The Age Of Reform

The Age of Reform

From Bryan to F.D.R.

B Y

RICHARD HOFSTADTER

New York Alfred A. Knopf 1956

L C catalog card number 54-7206
© Richard Hofstadter, 1955

H THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK,

^ PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC. g

Copyright 1955 by Richard Hofstadter . AZZ rights reserved. No
part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permis-
sion in writing from the publisher , except by a reviewer who may
quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a magazine or
newspaper. Manufactured in the United States of America Pub-
lished simultaneously in Canada by McClelland 6- Stewart Limited.

Published October 17 , 1955
Second printing , September 1956

T O

BE A TRICE

CONTENTS

Introduction

i. The Agrarian Myth and Commercial Realities 23

1 . THE YEOMAN AND THE MYTH 23

2. THE FARMER AND THE REALITIES 36

3. THE FRONTIER OR THE MARKET? 46

n. The Folklore of Populism 60

1 . THE TWO NATIONS 60

2 . HISTORY AS CONSPIRACY 70

3. THE SPIRIT MILITANT 8l

in. From Pathos to Parity 94

1 . SUCCESS THROUGH FAILURE 94

2 . THE GOLDEN AGE AND AFTER IO9

3 - THE VANISHING HAYSEED 120

iv. The Status Revolution and Progressive Leaders 131

1. THE PLUTOCRACY AND THE MUGWUMP TYPE 131

2. THE ALIENATION OF THE PROFESSIONALS 148

3. FROM THE MUGWUMP TO THE PROGRESSIVE 163

v. The Progressive Impulse 173

2 . THE URBAN SCENE 173

2 . MUCKRAKING: THE REVOLUTION IN JOURNAL-
ISM 185

3. REALITY AND RESPONSIBILITY 196

vi. The Struggle over Organization 213

2 . ORGANIZATION AND THE INDIVIDUAL 2 X 3

2 . THE STATE AND THE TRUSTS 225

3. THE CITIZEN AND THE MACHINE 254

vn. From Progressivism to the New Deal 270

2 . PROGRESSIVISM AND WAR 270

2 . ENTRACTE 280

3. THE NEW DEPARTURE 3OO

4 . THE NEW OPPORTUNISM 314

Acknowledgments

Index

327

follows page 328

The Age of Reform

INTRODUCTION

ClFust as the cycle of American history running from the Civil
War to the 1890’s can be thought of chiefly as a period of in-
dustrial and continental expansion and political conservatism,
so the age that has just passed, running from about 1890 to the
second World War, can be considered an age of reform. The
surge of reform, though largely turned back in the 1890’s and
temporarily reversed in the 1920’s, has set the tone of American
politics for the greater part of the twentieth century. The reform
movements of the past sixty-five years fall readily into three
main episodes, the first two of which are almost continuous with
each other: the agrarian uprising that found its most intense
expression in the Populism of the 1890’s and the Bryan cam-
paign of 1896; the Progressive movement, which extended from
about 1900 to 1914, and the New Deal, whose dynamic phase
was concentrated in a few years of the 1930’s.

This book has been inspired not by a desire to retell the
familiar story of the primary movements of reform in the United
States since 1890, but by the need for a new analysis from the
perspective of our own time. My first interest was in the period
from 1890 to the beginning of the first World War, but the more
I worked upon the problems of that period, the more it was im-
pressed upon me that its character could be far better under-
stood if it was briefly compared and contrasted with the New
Deal. Hence I have added a final chapter, which should not
be taken as a full exploration of that relationship. Today we
are more remote in time from the first inaugural address of
Franklin D. Roosevelt than Roosevelt himself was on March 4,
1933 from the first inaugural address of Woodrow Wilson. As

6

THE AGE OF REFORM

courts, nor the work of regulatory commissions, but the ideas
of the participants— their conception of what was wrong, the
changes they sought, and the techniques they thought desirable.
My theme, then, is the conception the participants had of their
own work and the place it would occupy in the larger stream of
our history. While my book is, in this sense, primarily a study of
political thinking and of political moods, it is not a study of our
high culture, but of the kind of thinking that impinged most
directly upon the ordinary politically conscious citizen. Mor-
ton G. White in his Social Thought in America has analyzed
the impact of the Progressive era upon more advanced specu-
lation in philosophy, political theory, sociology, and history. My
chief concern is not with such work, not with the best but with
the most characteristic thinking, with the middlebrow writers,
and with the issues as they were presented in the popular maga-
zines, the muckraking articles, the campaign speeches, and the
essays of the representative journalists and influential publicists.
Of course the high culture and the ordinary culture overlapped
and interacted, as they always do, and there were men capable
of playing a part in both. At some points, too, the more specu-
lative thinkers who could be classed as Progressives were them-
selves critical of important aspects of what I have called Pro-
gressive thinking. For instance, when I argue that the goals of
most Progressives were profoundly individualistic, I do not for-
get that some of the most important speculative writing of the
age in politics, psychology, and philosophy drew upon the same
events and concerns to arrive at opposite conclusions. Nor do I
intend to ignore the fact that some Progressive thinkers, like
Herbert Croly, and even a few Progressive political leaders, like
Theodore Roosevelt, were astute critics of this predominant
yearning for individualism. Intellectuals, and often indeed some
of our shrewdest politicians, keep a certain distance even from
the political and social movements with which they sympathize,
and their work becomes a criticism both of these movements and
of the institutions they are directed against. One of the ironic

Introduction

7

problems confronting reformers around the turn of the century
was that the very activities they pursued in attempting to de-
fend or restore the individualistic values they admired brought
them closer to the techniques of organization they feared. The
most penetrating thinkers of the age understood somewhat more
of this situation than was understood in common discourse.

The Populist and Progressive movements took place during a
rapid and sometimes turbulent transition from the conditions of
an agrarian society to those of modern urban life. Standing
much closer to the completion of this change, we have in some
respects a clearer judgment of its meaning, but we are likely to
lose sight of the poignancy with which it was experienced by
earlier generations. The American tradition of democracy was
formed on the farm and in small villages, and its central ideas
were founded in rural sentiments and on rural metaphors (we
still speak of "grass-roots democracy”). For reasons I will try
to explore, the American was taught throughout the nineteenth
and even in the twentieth century that rural life and farming as
a vocation were something sacred. Since in the beginning the
majority of the people were farmers, democracy, as a rather
broad abstraction, became in the same way sacrosanct. A certain
complacency and self-righteousness thus entered into rural
thinking, and this complacency was rudely shocked by the
conquests of industrialism. A good deal of the strain and the
sense of anxiety in Populism results from this rapid decline of
rural America.

And yet it is too little realized that the farmers, who were
quite impotent as a special interest when they were numerous,
competing, and unorganized, grew stronger as they grew rela-
tively fewer, became more concerted, more tenaciously organ-
ized and self-centered. One of the cliches of Populism was the
notion that, whatever the functions of the other vocations, the
function of the farmer was pre-eminent in importance because
he fed, and thus supported, all the others. Although it has been
heard somewhat less frequently of late, and a counter-ideology

8

THE AGE OF REFORM

of urban resentment has even begun to appear, our national
folklore still bears the heavy imprint of that idea. In reality
something like the opposite has become true — that the rest
of us support the farmer; for industrial and urban America,
sentimentally and morally committed to the ideal of the family
farm, has undertaken out of its remarkable surpluses to support
more farm-owners on the farm than it really needs under mod-
em agricultural technology. It is in part because of the persist-
ence of our agrarian traditions that this concession to the farm-
ers arouses less universal antagonism than do the efforts of other
groups menaced by technological changes — say, the musicians
and the building-trades workers — to set up artificial safeguards
for themselves. My opening pages are given to the exploration
of this long-range swing from the pastoral legends of early
nineteenth-century democracy to the complexities of modem
American life.

Another circumstance attending the rise of Populism and
Progressivism m America was unique in the modern world. Here
the industrialization and urbanization of the country were cou-
pled with a breakdown m the relative homogeneity of the
population. American democracy, down to about 1880, had
been not only rural but Yankee and Protestant m its basic
notions, and such enclaves of immigrants as had thus far
developed were too small and scattered to have a major nation-
wide impact upon the scheme of its civic life. The rise of in-
dustry, however, brought with it what contemporaries thought
of as an “immigrant invasion,” a massive forty-year migration of
Europeans, chiefly peasants, whose religions, traditions, lan-
guages, and sheer numbers made easy assimilation impossible.
Populism and Progressivism were in considerable part colored
by the reaction to this immigrant stream among the native ele-
ments of the population. Out of the clash between the needs of
the immigrants and the sentiments of the natives there emerged
two thoroughly different systems of political ethics, the nature
and interactions of which I have tried briefly to define. One,

Introduction

9

founded upon the indigenous Yankee-Protestant political tradi-
tions, and upon middle-class life, assumed and demanded the
constant, disinterested activity of the citizen in public affairs,
argued that political life ought to be run, to a greater degree
than it was, in accordance with general principles and abstract
laws apart from and superior to personal needs, and expressed
a common feeling that government should be in good part an
effort to moralize the lives of individuals while economic life
should be intimately related to the stimulation and development
of individual character. The other system, founded upon the
European backgrounds of the immigrants, upon their unfamili-
arity with independent political action, their familiarity with
hierarchy and authority, and upon the urgent needs that so often
grew out of their migration, took for granted that the political
life of the individual would arise out of family needs, interpreted
political and civic relations chiefly in terms of personal obliga-
tions, and placed strong personal loyalties above allegiance to
abstract codes of law or morals. It was chiefly upon this system
of values that the political life of the immigrant, the boss, and
the urban machine was based. In many ways the struggles of
the Progressive era were influenced by the conflict between the
two codes elaborated on one side by the highly moral leaders
of Protestant social reform and on the other by the bosses, po-
litical professionals, and immigrant masses. Since they stemmed
from different views not only of politics but of morals and even
of religion, it is hardly surprising that the conflicts of the period,
often so modest in actual substance, aroused antagonisms so
intense and misunderstandings so complete.

The political values and the ideas of government that had
been formed in the rural Yankee world were profoundly influ-
enced by entrepreneurship and the ideal of individual success.
The side of the left in American political history — that is, the
side of popular causes and of reform — had always been rela-
tively free of the need or obligation to combat feudal traditions
and entrenched aristocracies. It had neither revolutionary tradi-

10

THE AGE OF REFORM

tions, in the bourgeois sense (the American Revolution itself
was a legalistic and socially conservative affair), nor proletarian-
ism and social democracy of the kind familiar in all the great
countries' of the West in the late nineteenth century. American
traditions of political revolt had been based upon movements
against monopolies and special privileges in both the economic
and the political spheres, against social distinctions and the re-
striction of credit, against limits upon the avenues of personal
advancement. Because it was always possible to assume a re-
markable measure of social equality and a fair minimum of sub-
sistence, the goal of revolt tended to be neither social democracy
nor social equality, but greater opportunities. At the turn of the
century the world with which the majority even of the reformers
was most affectionately familiar was the passing world of indi-
vidual enterprise, predominantly small or modest-sized business,
and a decentralized, not too highly organized life. In the Pro-
gressive era the life of business, and to some degree even of
government, was beginning to pass from an individualistic form
toward one demanding industrial discipline and engendering a
managerial and bureaucratic outlook. The protests of reformers
against this state of affairs often took the form of demands for
the maintenance of the kind of opportunity that was passing
rather than for the furtherance of existing tendencies toward
organization. Most Americans who came from the Yankee-
Protestant environment, whether they were reformers or con-
servatives, wanted economic success to continue to be related
to personal character, wanted the economic system not merely
to be a system for the production of sufficient goods and services
but to be an effectual system of incentives and rewards. The
great corporation, the crass plutocrat, the calculating political
boss, all seemed to defy these desires. Success in the great cor-
poration seemed to have a very dubious relation to character
and enterprise; and when one observed the behavior of the
plutocracy, it seemed to be inversely related to civic responsi-
bility and personal restraint. The competitive process seemed to

Introduction

11

be drying up. All of society was felt to be threatened — not by
economic breakdown but by moral and social degeneration and
the eclipse of democratic institutions. This is not to say, how-
ever, that the men of the age gave way to despair; for they
believed that, just as the sinner can be cleansed and saved, so
the nation could be redeemed if the citizens awoke to their
responsibilities. This mood of hope, in which the Progressive
agitations were conducted, lasted until the first World War.

The next episode in the history of reform, the New Deal, was
itself a product of that overorganized world which had so much
troubled the Progressives. The trend toward management, to-
ward bureaucracy, toward bigness everywhere had gone so far
that even the efforts of reform itself had to be consistent with it.
Moreover, as the New Deal era went on, leadership in reform
had to be shared increasingly with an organized working class
large enough to make important demands and to wield great
political power. The political and moral codes of the immigrant
masses of the cities, of the political bosses, of labor leaders, of
intellectuals and administrators, now clashed with the old no-
tions of economic morality. Some of the social strata and many
of the social types that had seen great merit in the more limited
reforms of the Progressive era found themselves in a bewildering
new situation and, especially after the passing of the most criti-
cal depression years, grew increasingly offended by the novelties
with which they were surrounded. The New Deal, with its prag-
matic spirit and its relentless emphasis upon results, seemed to
have carried them farther than ever from the kind of society in
which economic life was linked to character and to distinctively
entrepreneurial freedoms and opportunities.

In the attempts of the Populists and Progressives to hold on
to some of the values of agrarian life, to save personal entre-
preneurship and individual opportunity and the character type
they engendered, and to maintain a homogeneous Yankee civili-
zation, I have found much that was retrograde and delusive, a
little that was vicious, and a good deal that was comic. To say

12

THE AGE OF REFORM

this is not to say that these values were in themselves nonsensi-
cal or bad. The ideal of a life lived close to nature and the soil,
the esteem for the primary contacts of country and village life,
the cherished image of the independent and self-reliant man,
even the desire (for all the snobberies and hatreds it inspired)
to maintain an ethnically more homogeneous nation — these were
not negligible or contemptible ideals, and to those who felt most
deeply about them their decline was a tragic experience that
must be attended to with respect even by those who can share
it only through some effort of the imagination. My comments,
then, on the old agrarian and entrepreneurial aspirations are not
intended to disparage them as ultimate values but to raise some
safeguards against the political misuse of them that was and
sometimes still is attempted, and perhaps to shed some indirect
light on the methods by which that part of them that is still
meaningful can be salvaged.

I find that I have been critical of the Populist-Progressive tra-
dition — more so than I would have been had I been writing such
a study fifteen years ago. I say critical, but not hostile, for I am
criticizing largely from within. The tradition of Progressive re-
form is the one upon which I was reared and upon which my
political sentiments were formed, as it is, indeed, the tradition
of most intellectuals in America. Perhaps because in its politics
the United States has been so reliably conservative a country
during the greater part of its history, its main intellectual tradi-
tions have been, as a reaction, ‘liberal,” as we say — that is, popu-
lar, democratic, progressive. For all our conservatism as a peo-
ple, we have failed to develop a sound and supple tradition of
candidly conservative thinking. As Lionel Trilling remarks in
The Liberal Imagination , our conservatives, with only a few
exceptions, have not sought to express themselves in ideas, as
opposed to action; they have only manifested “irritable mental
gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” The American business-
man is expected to be a conservative in his politics. The con-

Introduction

13

servative American politician can expect widespread recogni-
tion, frequently a long tenure in office, and usually a rewarding
sense of public usefulness, even though we usually reserve our
highest acclaim for the politician who has in him a touch of the
liberal reformer. A conservative politician who has sufficient
gifts — Theodore Roosevelt is the best example — can in fact en-
joy both respectability and the financial support of the great
interests and all the satisfactions of the conservative role in
public affairs and yet exert his maximal influence by using the
rhetoric of progressivism and winning the plaudits of the re-
formers. In times past, however, the conservative intellectual,
and with him the conservative politician who attempted to give
to his actions the support of reasoned belief, has been rather out
of touch with the main lines of thought and with the primary
public that he wanted to reach. The flow of criticism be-
tween conservatives and liberals in the United States has been
somewhat blocked, with the consequence that men on both sides
have grown excessively complacent about their intellectual po-
sitions. In the absence of a formidable and reasoned body of
conservative criticism, liberals have been driven, for that exer-
cise of the mind which intellectuals seek, to self-criticism, which
has been of less value to them than powerful and searching
opposition.

In our own day, perhaps for the first time since the 1890’s, this
situation is changing, for there are some signs that liberals are
beginning to find it both natural and expedient to explore the
merits and employ the rhetoric of conservatism. They find them-
selves far more conscious of those things they would like to
preserve than they are of those things they would like to change.
The immense enthusiasm that was aroused among American
intellectuals by such a circumspect and sober gentleman as^
Adlai Stevenson in 1952 is the most outstanding evidence of this
conservatism. Stevenson himself remarked during the course of
his campaign that the liberals have become the true conserva-
tives of our time. This is true not because they have some

14

THE AGE OF REFORM

sweeping ideological commitment to conservatism (indeed,
their sentiments and loyalties still lie mainly in another direc-
tion) but because they feel that we can better serve ourselves
in the calculable future by holding to what we have gained and
learned, while trying to find some way out of the dreadful im-
passe of our polarized world, than by dismantling the social
achievements of the past twenty years, abandoning all that is
best in American traditions, and indulging in the costly pietense
of repudiating what we should not and in fact cannot repudiate.

My criticisms of the Populist-Progressive tradition, in so far
as they are at all tinctured by conservatism, are no doubt in
part a response to this mood. I do not like to think of these
criticisms as being associated with the "New Conservatism” of
our time, which seems so modish that I find myself uncomforta-
ble with it. The use of such a term as “New Conservatism” only
suggests to me how uneasy Americans still are in the presence
of candidly conservative ideas. I should have thought that any-
thing that was good in conservatism was very old indeed, and
so that finest of American conservatives, John Adams, would tell
us if he could. To propagate something called “New Conserva-
tism” sounds to me too much like the crasser forms of salesman-
ship. It is in itself a capitulation to the American demand for
constant change, and hence a betrayal of conservatism at the
outset. We Americans love to have everything labeled "new” and
"big,” and yet what is of most value in conservatism is its feeling
for the past and for nuances of thought, of administration, of
method, of meaning, that might be called "little.” What appeals
to me in the New Conservatism, in so far as anything does at all,
is simply the old liberalism, chastened by adversity, tempered
by time, and modulated by a growing sense of reality. Hence,
to the degree that I have been critical in these pages of the
Populist-Progressive tradition, it is criticism that aims to reveal
some of the limitations of that tradition and to help free it of its
sentimentalities and complacencies — in short, to carry on with

Introduction 15

a task so largely shirked by its opponents that it must be per-
formed by its supporters.

It would be unfair not to add — indeed, to emphasize as much
as it is possible to do here — that most of the failings in the
liberal tradition that have attracted my interest are also failings
of American political culture in general, and that they are usu-
ally shared by American conservatives. The most prominent and
pervasive failing is a certain proneness to fits of moral crusading
that would be fatal if they were not sooner or later tempered
with a measure of apathy and of common sense. Eric Goldman,
in his history of American reform, Rendezvous with Destiny ,
criticizes Progressive intellectuals for propagating a moral rela-
tivism that, by making all moral judgments the products of par-
ticular locales and particular historical situations, eventually
undermined confidence in the significance of moral judgments
as such. "The real trouble with us reformers,” he quotes J. Allen
Smith as having said, "is that we made reform a crusade against
standards. Well, we smashed them all and now neither we nor
anybody else have anything left.” This accusation has, in my
view, a certain pertinence to some liberals in our time, and par-
ticularly to those who were known a few years ago as "totali-
tarian liberals” — that is, to the type of professed liberals who
failed to demand of their own side the civic principles they ex-
pected of others, who exempted movements deemed to be "his-
torically progressive” from the moral judgments to which all
other movements were subjected, and who in particular denied
or granted special indulgences to the barbarities and tyrannies
of Soviet politics that they freely recognized and condemned in
the fascist countries. But this kind of thing, lamentable as it was,
has not been the characteristic failing of most modern American
reform movements, and certainly was not widely characteristic
of the Populist-Progressive thinking of the period from 1890 to
1917. My criticism of the Progressivism of that period is the
opposite of Smith’s — not that the Progressives most typically

16

THE AGE OF REFORM

undermined or smashed standards, but that they set impossible
standards, that they were victimized, in brief, by a form of
moral absolutism. It is possible that the distinction between
moral relativism and moral absolutism has sometimes been
blurred because an excessively consistent practice of either leads
to the same practical result — ruthlessness in political life.

A great part of both the strength and the weakness of our
national existence lies in the fact that Americans do not abide
very quietly the evils of life. We are forever restlessly pitting
ourselves against them, demanding changes, improvements,
remedies, but not often with sufficient sense of the limits that
the human condition will in the end insistently impose upon us.
This restlessness is most valuable and has its most successful
consequences wherever dealing with things is involved, in tech-
nology and invention, in productivity, in the ability to meet
needs and provide comforts. In this sphere we have surpassed
all other peoples. But in dealing with human beings and insti-
tutions, in matters of morals and politics, the limits of this un-
dying, absolutist restlessness quickly become evident. At the
so-called grass roots of American politics there is a wide and
pervasive tendency to believe — I hasten to add that the majority
of Americans do not habitually succumb to this tendency — that
there is some great but essentially very simple struggle going on,
at the heart of which there lies some single conspiratorial force,
whether it be the force represented by the "gold bugs,” the
Catholic Church, big business, corrupt politicians, the liquor
interests and the saloons, or the Communist Party, and that this
evil is something that must be not merely limited, checked, and
controlled but rather extirpated root and branch at the earliest
possible moment. It is widely assumed that some technique can
be found that will really do this, though there is always likely
to be a good deal of argument as to what that technique is. All
too often the assumption prevails among our political and intel-
lectual leaders that the judgment of the people about such
things must of necessity be right, and that it is therefore their

Introduction

17

own business not to educate the public or to curb its demands
for the impossible but to pretend that these demands are alto-
gether sensible and to try to find ways to placate them.

So we go off on periodical psychic sprees that purport to be
moral crusades: liberate the people once and for all from the
gold bugs, restore absolute popular democracy or completely
honest competition in business, wipe out the saloon and liquor
forever from the nation’s life, destroy the political machines and
put an end to corruption, or achieve absolute, total, and final
security against war, espionage, and the affairs of the external
world. The people who attach themselves to these several abso-
lutisms are not always the same people, but they do create for
each other a common climate of absolutist enthusiasm. Very
often the evils they are troubled about do exist in some form,
usually something can be done about them, and in a great many
historical instances something has been done. It is the merit of
our reform tradition that it has usually been the first to point to
the real and serious deficiencies in our economic system and that
it has taken the initiative in making improvements. It is its limi-
tation that it often wanders over the border between reality and
impossibility. This was, I believe, pre-eminently true of the
Progressive generation. It is hardly an accident that the gener-
ation that wanted to bring about direct popular rule, break up
the political machines, and circumvent representative govern-
ment was the same generation that imposed Prohibition on the
country and proposed to make the world safe for democracy.

I believe it will be clear that what I am trying to establish
is not that the Populist and Progressive movements were foolish
and destructive but only that they had, like so many things in
life, an ambiguous character. Of their substantial net value in
the main stream of American political experience I have no
doubt. There has always been in the United States a struggle
against those forces which were too exclusively preoccupied
with the organization of economic life and the milking of our
resources to give much thought to the human costs or to expend

18

THE AGE OF REFORM

much sympathy on the victims of their work It has been the
function of the liberal tradition in American politics, from the
time of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democracy down through
Populism, Progressivism, and the New Deal, at first to broaden
the numbers of those who could benefit from the great American
bonanza and then to humanize its workings and help heal its
casualties. Without this sustained tradition of opposition and
protest and reform, the American system would ha\e been, as
in times and places it was, nothing but a jungle, and would
probably have failed to develop into the remarkable system for
production and distribution that it is. If we were to follow the
history of but one issue alone — that of taxation in all its aspects
— we would be quickly reminded of the enormous debt we owe
to the liberal tradition for shifting the costs of society to those
who are best able to bear them. Fifty or sixty years ago our
social system had hardly begun to be touched by the gentle
hands of remorse or reform. Today, as a result of an unintended,
intermittent, and usually hostile collaboration of the opposing
forces of matter-of-fact profit-seeking, engineering, and sales-
manship on one hand and dissent and reform on the other, it
has been altered and softened in countless ways. The place of
the progressive tradition in this achievement is so secure that it
should now be possible to indulge in some critical comments
without seeming to impugn its entire value.

While it is always both feasible and desirable to formulate
ideal programs of reform, it is asking too much to expect that
history will move, so to speak, in a straight line to realize them.
Liberal intellectuals, who have rather well-rationalized systems
of political beliefs, tend to expect that the masses of people,
whose actions at certain moments in history coincide with some
of these beliefs, will share their other convictions as a matter of
logic and principle. Intellectuals, moreover, suffer from a sense
of isolation which they usually seek to surmount by finding ways
of getting into rapport with the people, and they readily suc-
cumb to a tendency to sentimentalize the folk. Hence they

Introduction

19

periodically exaggerate the measure of agreement that exists
between movements of popular reform and the considered prin-
ciples of political liberalism. They remake the image of popular
rebellion closer to their heart’s desire. They choose to ignore not
only the elements of illiberalism that frequently seem to be an
indissoluble part of popular movements but also the very com-
plexity of the historical process itself. In theory we may feel
that we can in most cases distinguish without excessive difficulty
between reforms that are useful remedies for the evils and
abuses of our society and changes that are in fact only additions
to or aggravations of such abuses. Popular movements do not
always operate with the same discrimination, and it is often
hard to tell when such a movement has passed beyond the de-
mand for important and necessary reforms to the expression of
a resentment so inclusive that it embraces not only the evils and
abuses of a society but the whole society itself, including some
of its more liberal and humane values. One can hardly read such
works as Reinhard Luthin’s recent study of twentieth-century
American demagogy or Albert D. Kirwan’s treatise on Missis-
sippi politics, Revolt of the Rednecks , without finding abundant
evidence of this coexistence of illiberalism and reform, and of
its continuity in our history.

These points are, I believe, applicable to the history of
twentieth-century American reform movements. We tend, for
instance, to think of both Populism and Progressivism in con-
nection with the many ways in which they can be considered
precursors of the more useful reforms of the New Deal era.
Actually, as I suggest in my final chapter, the spirit of the Pro-
gressive era was quite different from that of the New Deal.
While there are genuine points of similarity and continuity,
which I do not wish to deny or minimize, my own interest has
been drawn to that side of Populism and Progressivism — par-
ticularly of Populism — which seems very strongly to foreshadow
some aspects of the cranky pseudo-conservatism of our time.
Somewhere along the way a large part of the Populist-Progres-

20

THE AGE OF REFORM

sive tradition has turned sour, become illiberal and ill-tempered.
Since most of my concern in this volume has been with the
period before 1917, and since the greater part of this souring
process took place after 1917, and even after 1930, I have not
attempted to deal in any detail with this transformation. And
yet I think it might well be a leading preoccupation of any
history of American political movements since the first World
War. What I have tried to do, in my treatment of the earlier
history of reform, is to show that this process of deconversion
from reform to reaction did not require the introduction of any-
thing wholly new into the political sensibilities of the American
public but only a development of certain tendencies that had
existed all along, particularly in the Middle West and the South.

Such tendencies in American life as isolationism and the ex-
treme nationalism that usually goes with it, hatred of Europe
and Europeans, racial, religious, and nativist phobias, resent-
ment of big business, trade-unionism, intellectuals, the Eastern
seaboard and its culture — all these have been found not only
in opposition to reform but also at times oddly combined with
it One of the most interesting and least studied aspects of
American life has been the frequent recurrence of the demand
for reforms, many of them aimed at the remedy of genuine ills,
combined with strong moral convictions and with the choice of
hatred as a kind of creed. The history of this characteristic of
our political experience has never been studied on the folk level,
but it has been reflected in the caliber of our leadership. One
finds it, for instance, in the families of the two Charles A. Lind-
berghs, and the two Martin Dieses, where in both cases the
fathers were populistic or Progressive isolationists and the sons
became heroes of the extreme right. One finds it in the careers of
such Western and Midwestern Senators as Burton K. Wheeler,
Gerald P. Nye, Lynn Frazier, and William Lemke, and in such
Southerners as Tom Watson, Pitchfork Ben Tillman, Cole
Blease, James K. Vardaman, and Huey Long. Nor is it confined
to practical politics. It has its representatives in literature, like

Introduction

21

Jack London, and in journalism, like William Randolph Hearst.

We have ah been taught to regard it as more or less “natural”
for young dissenters to become conservatives as they grow older;
but the phenomenon I am concerned with is not quite the same,
for it involves not so much the progression from one political
position to another as the continued coexistence of reformism
and reaction; and when it takes the form of a progression in
time, it is a progression very often unattended by any real
change in personal temper. No doubt the precise line between
useful and valid criticism of any society and a destructive alien-
ation from its essential values is not always easy to draw. Some
men, and indeed some political movements, seem to live close
to that line and to swing back and forth across it more than once
in their lives. The impulses behind yesterday's reform may be
put in the service of reform today, but they may also be enlisted
in the service of reaction.

I am fully aware of the dangers of overemphasizing here the
resemblances and the continuities between the currents of po-
litical feeling that trouble liberals today and their counterparts
in earlier reform movements — the danger of becoming too
present-minded to have a sound sense of historical veracity, of
pushing an insight beyond the bounds of its valid application.
Populism, for all its zany fringes, was not an unambiguous fore-
runner of modern authoritarian movements; nor was Progres-
sivism, despite the falhble concept of mass democracy it some-
times sought to advance, an unambiguous harbinger of our most
troublesome contemporary delusions. Among those things which
must be kept in mind when we think of the period between 1890
and 1917 is that it had about it an innocence and relaxation that
cannot again be known, now that totalitarianism has emerged.
Mr. Dooley, one of the shrewdest commentators of that age,
saw its character quite clearly when he said, even at the height
of the Progressive ferment: “Th’ noise ye hear is not th’ first gun
iv a rivolution. It’s on’y th’ people iv the United States batin’ a
carpet.”

22

THE AGE OF REFORM

There are, however, complexities in our history which our
conventional images of the past have not caught, and we need to
know more than we do about our political traditions before our
own generation can finish its portraits of earlier reformers. For
this reason I hope that my observations will be taken as a pre-
lude and a spur to further studies of American reform move-
ments and not as an attempt to render a final judgment.

((( 23 )))

CHAPTER I

THE AGRARIAN MYTH
AND COMMERCIAL REALITIES

i. The Yeoman and the Myth

T

JL he United States was born in the country and has moved to
the city. From the beginning its political values and ideas were
of necessity shaped by country life. The early American poli-
tician, the country editor, who wished to address himself to the
common man, had to draw upon a rhetoric that would touch
the tillers of the soil; and even the spokesman of city people
knew that his audience had been in very large part reared upon
the farm. But what the articulate people who talked and wrote
about farmers and farming — the preachers, poets, philosophers,
writers, and statesmen — liked about American farming was not,
in every respect, what the typical working farmer liked. For the
articulate people were drawn irresistibly to the noncommercial,
nonpecuniary, self-sufficient aspect of American farm life. To
them it was an ideal. Writers like Thomas Jefferson and Hector
St. Jean de Crevecoeur admired the yeoman farmer not for his
capacity to exploit opportunities and make money but for his
honest industry, his independence, his frank spirit of equality,
his ability to produce and enjoy a simple abundance. The farmer
himself, in most cases, was in fact inspired to make money, and
such self-sufficiency as he actually had was usually forced upon
him by a lack of transportation or markets, or by the necessity
to save cash to expand his operations. For while early American

24

THE AGE OF REFORM

society was an agrarian society, it was fast becoming more com-
mercial, and commercial goals made their way among its agri-
cultural classes almost as rapidly as elsewhere. The more com-
mercial this society became, however, the more reason it found
to cling in imagination to the noncommercial agrarian values.
The more farming as a self-sufficient way of life was aban-
doned for farming as a business, the more merit men found in
what was being left behind. And the more rapidly the farmers’
sons moved into the towns, the more nostalgic the whole culture
became about its rural past. The American mind was raised
upon a sentimental attachment to rural living and upon a series
of notions about rural people and rural life that I have chosen
to designate as the agrarian myth . 1 The agrarian myth represents
a kind of homage that Americans have paid to the fancied in-
nocence of their origins.

Like any complex of ideas, the agrarian myth cannot be de-
fined in a phrase, but its component themes form a clear pat-
tern. Its hero was the yeoman farmer, its central conception the
notion that he is the ideal man and the ideal citizen. Unstinted
praise of the special virtues of the farmer and the special values
of rural life was coupled with the assertion that agriculture, as
a calling uniquely productive and uniquely important to society,
had a special right to the concern and protection of government.
The yeoman, who owned a small farm and worked it with the
aid of his family, was the incarnation of the simple, honest, in-
dependent, healthy, happy human being. Because he lived in
close communion with beneficent nature, his life was believed to
have a wholesomeness and integrity impossible for the depraved
populations of cities. His well-being was not merely physical,
it was moral; it was not merely personal, it was the central

x By “myth,” as I use the word here, I do not mean an idea that is
simply false, but rather one that so effectively embodies men’s values that
it profoundly influences their way of perceiving reality and hence their be-
havior. In this sense myths may have varying degrees of fiction or reality.
The agrarian myth became increasingly fictional as time went on.

25

Chapter i: The Agrarian Myth and Commercial Realities

source of civic virtue; it was not merely secular but religious, for
God had made the land and called man to cultivate it. Since the
yeoman was believed to be both happy and honest, and since he
had a secure propertied stake in society in the form of his own
land, he was held to be the best and most reliable sort of citizen.
To this conviction Jefferson appealed when he wrote: “The small
land holders are the most precious part of a state .” 2

In origin the agrarian myth was not a popular but a literary
idea, a preoccupation of the upper classes, of those who enjoyed
a classical education, read pastoral poetry, experimented with
breeding stock, and owned plantations or country estates. It was
clearly formulated and almost universally accepted in America
during the last half of the eighteenth century. As it took shape
both in Europe and America, its promulgators drew heavily
upon the authority and the rhetoric of classical writers — Hesiod,
Xenophon, Cato, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, and others — whose
works were the staples of a good education. A learned agricul-
tural gentry, coming into conflict with the industrial classes,
welcomed the moral strength that a rich classical ancestiy
brought to the praise of husbandry. In France the Physiocrats
preached that agriculture is the only true source of wealth. In
England the rural entrepreneurs, already interested in breeding
and agricultural improvement, found the praise of husbandry
congenial. They enjoyed it in James Thomsons Seasons , or in
Drydens translation of Horace:

How happy in his low degree ,

How rich in humble poverty , is he.

Who leads a quiet country life.

Discharged of business, void of strife,

And from the griping scrivener free?

2 Writings, ed. by Paul L. Ford (New York, 1892-9), Vol. VII, p. 36
For a full statement of the agiarian myth as it was formulated by Jefferson
see A. Whitney Gnswold: Farming and Democracy (New York, 1948),
chapter n.

26

THE AGE OF REFORM

Thus, ere the seeds of vice were sown.
Lived men in better ages horn.
Who plough'd with oxen of their own,
Their small paternal field of corn .

“There is, indeed, scarcely any writer,” declared Samuel Johnson
in 1751, “who had not celebrated the happiness of rural pri-
vacy. 3

Wherever the peasantry was being displaced by industry or
commercial farming, and particularly in England, where rustic
life was devastated by the enclosures, such literature took on
special poignancy. Oliver Goldsmiths classic statement, “The
Deserted Village,” became well over a hundred years later the
unchallenged favorite of American Populist writers and orators.
Chiefly through English experience, and from English and clas-
sical writers, the agrarian myth came to America, where, like
so many other cultural importations, it eventually took on al-
together new dimensions in its new setting. In America such
men as Jefferson and Crevecosur, Thomas Paine, Philip Freneau,
Hugh Henry Brackenridge, and George Logan propagated the

3 Quoted by Paul H. Johnstone: “Turnips and Romanticism,” Agricul-
tural History , Vol. XII (July 1938), p. 239. This article and the same au-
thor's “In Praise of Husbandry,” ibid., Vol. XI (April 1937), pp. 80-95,
give an excellent brief history of the entire agrarian tradition.

With Dryden's Horace compare Benjamin Franklin's almanac, quoted by
Chester E. Eismger: “The Fanner m the Eighteenth Century Almanac,”
ibid., Vol. XXVIII (July 1954), p. 112:

O happy he! happiest of mortal Men!

Who far remov'd from Slavery, as from Pnde,

Fears no Man's Frown, nor cringing waits to catch
The gracious Nothing of a great Man's Nod,

Tempted nor with the Pnde nor Pomp of Power,

Nor Pageants of Ambition, nor the Mines
Of grasping Av'nce, nor the poison'd Sweets
Of pamper'd Luxury, he plants his Foot
With Firmness on his old paternal Fields,

And stands unshaken.

Chapter i: The Agrarian Myth and Commercial Realities 27

myth, and after them a multitude of writers whose lives reach
well into the nineteenth century. 4 So appealing were its symbols
that even an arch-opponent of the agrarian interest like Alex-
ander Hamilton found it politic to concede in his Report on
Manufactures that "the cultivation of the earth, as the primary
and most certain source of national supply, . . . has intrinsi-
cally a strong claim to pre-eminence over every other kind of
industry/’ 5 And Benjamin Franklin, urban cosmopolite though
he was, once said that agriculture was "the only honest way * for
a nation to acquire wealth, "wherein man receives a real increase
of the seed thrown into the ground, a kind of continuous mira-
cle, wrought by the hand of God in his favour, as a reward for
his innocent life and virtuous industry.” 6

Among the intellectual classes in the eighteenth century the
agrarian myth had virtually universal appeal. It was every-
where: in tracts on agricultural improvement and books on eco-
nomics, in pastoral poetry and political philosophy. At once
primitivist and rationalist, it could be made congenial to almost
every temperament. Some writers used it to give simple, direct,
and emotional expression to their feelings about life and nature;
others linked agrarianism with a formal philosophy of natural
rights. The application of the natural-rights philosophy to land
tenure became especially popular in America. Since the time of
Locke it had been a standard argument that the land is the
common stock of society to which every man has a right — what
Jefferson called "the fundamental right to labour the earth”; that
since the occupancy and use of land are the true criteria of valid
ownership, labor expended in cultivating the earth confers title

4 The prevalence of the myth in eighteenth-century America is shown
by Chester E. Eismger: “The Freehold Concept in Eighteenth-Century
American Letters,” William and Mary Quarterly, third senes, Vol. IV (Jan-
uary 1947), pp. 42-59.

5 Works , Vol. Ill, pp. 215-16.

6 Writings, ed. by Albert H. Smyth (New York, 1906), Vol. V, pp.
200 - 2 .

28

THE AGE OF REFORM

to it; that since government was created to protect property, the
property of working landholders has a special claim to be fos-
tered and protected by the state . 7

At first, as I have said, the agrarian myth was a notion of the
educated classes, but by the early nineteenth century it had be-
come a mass creed , 8 a part of the country's political folklore and
its nationalist ideology. The roots of this change may be found
as far back as the American Revolution, which, appearing to
many Americans as the victory of a band of embattled farmers
over an empire, seemed to confirm the moral and civic superior-
ity of the yeoman, made the farmer a symbol of the new nation,
and wove the agrarian myth into its patriotic sentiments and
republican idealism. Still more important, the myth played a
role in the first party battles under the Constitution. The Jef-
fersonians appealed again and again to the moral primacy of
the yeoman farmer in their attacks on the Federalists. The fam-
ily farm and American democracy became indissolubly con-
nected in Jeffersonian thought , 9 and was inherited from the

7 Chester E. Eisinger: “The Influence of Natural Rights and Physio-
cratic Doctrines on American Agrarian Thought during the Revolutionary
Period, ” Agricultural History , Vol. XXI (January 1947), pp. 12-23. Cf.
Gnswold, op cit., pp 36-45

8 It is, of course, no more than a plausible guess what working farmers
actually believed, as opposed to what politicians and other opinion-makers
told them. Eisinger notes (“The Farmer m the Eighteenth Century Alma-
nac,” p 108 ) that even in the eighteenth century the editors of the farmers 5 *
almanacs neglected the practical aspects of farming to publish large
amounts of pastoral verse employing the familiar agrarian themes. Ap-
parently these editors felt that it was easier or more important to reassure
the farmer about the value of his role in society than to advise him how to
run his farm If the premises of the agrarian myth did not appeal to the
farmers, then they were completely misunderstood by all those who spoke
to and for them. For an excellent illustration of the acceptance of the
agranan myth m the nineteenth century by an influential editor, see Roland
Van Zandt: “Horace Greeley: Agranan Exponent of American Idealism,”
Rural Sociology , Vol XIII (December 1948), pp. 411-19. For the place of
the myth in Emerson's thought, see Douglas C. Stenerson: “Emerson and
the Agranan Tradition,” Journal of the History of Ideas , Vol. XIV (Jan-
uary 1953), pp. 95-115

9 Cf. Griswold's conclusion that Jefferson's view of the small farmers as
“the most precious part of a state” is “the classic American statement of the

29

Chapter i: The Agrarian Myth and Commercial Realities

Jeffersonians by exponents of popular causes in the Jackson era.
By 1840 even the more conservative party, the Whigs, took over
the rhetorical appeal to the common man, and elected a Presi-
dent in good part on the strength of the fiction that he lived in
a log cabin.

The Jeffersonians, moreover, made the agrarian myth the
basis of a strategy of continental development. 1 Many of them
expected that the great empty inland regions would guarantee
the preponderance of the yeoman — and therefore the dominance
of Jeffersonianism and the health of the state — for an unlimited
future. In his first inaugural address Jefferson spoke of the
United States as "a chosen country, with room enough for our
descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation.” The
opening of the trans-Allegheny region, its protection from slav-
ery, and the purchase of the Louisiana Territory were the first
great steps in a continental strategy designed to establish an
internal empire of small farms. Much later the Homestead Act,
though temporarily blocked by the South (the only section of
the country where the freehold concept was seriously contested
as an ideal), was meant to carry to its completion the process
of continental settlement by small homeowners. The failure of
the Homestead Act “to enact by statute the fee-simple empire” 2
was, as we shall see, one of the original sources of Populist
grievances, and one of the central points at which the agrarian
myth was overrun by the commercial realities.

Above all, however, the myth was powerful because the
United States in the first half of the nineteenth century consisted
predominantly of literate and politically enfranchised farmers.
Offering what seemed harmless flattery to this numerically domi-

political theory of the family farm. . . . [Jefferson’s] ideal of democracy
as a community of family farms has lived on to inspire the modem law-
makers and color the thoughts of their constituents when they turn their
minds to rural life ” Op. cit., pp. 45-6.

1 For a remarkable exposition of the fate of the agrarian myth as a
source of political measures and strategies, see Henry Nash Smith: Virgin
Land (Cambridge, 1950), Book Three, “The Garden of the World.”

2 Ibid , p. 170.

30

THE AGE OF REFORM

nant class, the myth suggested a standard vocabulary to rural
editors and politicians . 3 Although farmers may not have been
much impressed by what was said about the merits of a non-
commercial way of life, they could only enjoy learning about
their special virtues and their unique services to the nation,
could hardly mind hearing that their life was intrinsically more
virtuous and closer to God than the lives of many people who
seemed to be better off. Moreover, the editors and politicians
who so flattered them need not in most cases have been insin-
cere. More often than not they too were likely to have begun life
in little villages or on farms, and what they had to say stirred
in their own breasts, as it did in the breasts of a great many
townspeople, nostalgia for their early years, and perhaps re-
lieved some residual feelings of guilt at having deserted parental
homes and childhood attachments . 4 They also had the satisfac-
tion in the early days of knowing that in so far as it was based
upon the life of the largely self-sufficient yeoman the agrarian
myth was a depiction of reality as well as the assertion of an
ideal.

Oddly enough, the agrarian myth came to be believed more
widely and tenaciously as it became more fictional. At first it
was propagated with a kind of genial candor, and only later did
it acquire overtones of insincerity. There survives from the Jack-
son era a lithograph that shows Joseph Ritner, Governor of

3 In fact agricultural spokesmen have long fallen into two types. The
flatterers, usually politicians and journalists, are agrarians whose objective
is political and whose approach is to reassure the farmers about the im-
portance and the nobility of their role in society. The self-critics , usually
to be found among agricultural editors and some rural professional peo-
ple, are not agrarians but agriculturists. Their objectives are not political
but economic and technological. They tell the farmers that they are neg-
lectful and ignorant, that they largely earn their own misfortunes, and that
they must save themselves by studying science and improving their meth-
ods.

4 This nostalgia is a leading theme in the works of James Whitcomb
Riley, the most popular of American folk poets. Some of Hamhn Garland’s
stones in Main-Traveled Roads (Boston, 1891) deal with the sense of guilt
connected with migration from country to city.

31

Chapter i: The Agrarian Myth and Commercial Realities

Pennsylvania, standing by a primitive plow at the end of a fur-
row. There is no pretense that the Governor has actually been
plowing — he wears broadcloth pants and a silk vest, and his tall
black beaver hat has been carefully laid in the grass beside him
— but the picture is meant as a reminder of both his rustic
origin and his present high station in life. By contrast, Calvin
Coolidge posed almost a century later for a series of photographs
that represented him as haying in Vermont. In one of them the
President sits on the edge of a hay rig in a white shirt, collar
detached, wearing highly polished black shoes under a fresh
pair of overalls; in the background stands his Pierce Arrow, a
secret-service man on the running board, plainly waiting to
hurry the President away from his bogus rural labors. 5 That the
second picture is so much more pretentious and disingenuous
than the first is a measure of the increasing hollowness of the
myth as it became more and more remote from the realities of
agriculture. Well on into the twentieth century eminent Ameri-
cans continued to pay this ritualistic obeisance to what one
writer has called “agricultural fundamentalism.” 6 Coolidge him-
self, who showed monumental indifference to the real problems
of farmers in the 1920’s, none the less declared: “It has been
attested by all experience that agriculture tends to discourage-
ment and decadence whenever the predominant interests of the
country turn to manufacture and trade.” 7 Likewise Bernard
Baruch, a metropolitan financier whose chief contact with agri-
culture consisted in the absentee ownership of a country estate,
asserted: “Agriculture is the greatest and fundamentally the
most important of our American industries. The cities are but

5 On the survival of the agrarian myth in politics, see Roger Butter-
field's amusing essay “The Folldore of Politics,” Pennsylvania Magazine of
History and Biography , Vol. LXXIV (April 1950), pp. 165-70; the pic-
tures may be found facing pp. 166 and 167.

6 Joseph S Davis has discussed this survival in an essay on “Agricul-
tural Fundamentalism” in On Agricultural Policy (Stanford, 1939), pp.
24-43

7 Ibid., p. 38.

32

THE AGE OF REFORM

the branches of the tree of national life, the roots of which go
deeply into the land. We all flourish or decline with the
farmer,” 8

Throughout the nineteenth century hundreds upon hundreds
of thousands of farm-born youths had set the example that
Coolidge and Baruch only followed: they sang the praises of
agriculture but eschewed farming as a vocation and sought their
careers in the towns and cities. For all the rhetoric of the pasto-
ral tradition, nothing could keep the boys on the farm, and
nothing could conceal from the farm population itself the con-
tinuous restless movement not merely to farms farther west but
to urban areas, East and West. Particularly after 1840, which
marked the beginning of a long cycle of heavy country-to-city
migration, farm children repudiated their parents’ way of life
and took off for the cities, where in agrarian theory, if not in
fact, they were sure to succumb to vice and poverty. Farm jour-
nals were full of editorials, stories, and poems voicing the plain-
tive theme: “Boys, Stick to the Farm!” and of advice to farmers
on how to rear their sons so that farming as a way of life would
be attractive to them. 9 A typical bit of this folklore runs: 1

The great busy West has inducements ,

And so has the busiest mart ;

But wealth is not made in a day , boys.

Don’t be in a hurry to start!

The bankers and brokers are wealthy ,

They take in their thousands or so;

Ah! think of the frauds and deceptions —

Don’t be in a hurry to go.

8 Ibid., p. 25.

9 Albert J. Demaree: The American Agricultural Press , 1819-1860
(New York, 1941), pp 86-8, 183 ff ; Richard Bardolph: Agricultural Lit-
erature and the Early Illinois Farmer (Urbana, 1948), pp. 162-4.

1 Quoted by Bardolph, op. cit., p. 164 n.

Chapter i: The Agrarian Myth and Commercial Realities 33

The farm is the safest and surest;

The orchards are loaded today ;

You re free as the air of the mountains,

And monarch of all you survey.

Better stay on the farm a while longer,

Though profits come in rather slow;

Remember you’ve nothing to risk, boys —

Don’t be in a hurry to go.

In the imagery of these appeals the earth was characteristi-
cally a mother, trade a harlot, and desertion of ancestral ways
a betrayal that invited Providential punishment. When a cor-
respondent of the Prairie Farmer in 1849 made the mistake of
praising the luxuries, the ‘polished society,” and the economic
opportunities of the city, he was rebuked for overlooking the
fact that city life “crushes, enslaves, and ruins so many thou-
sands of our young men who are insensibly made the victims of
dissipation, of reckless speculation, and of ultimate crime.” 2
Such warnings, of course, were futile. “Thousands of young
men,” wrote the New York agriculturist Jesse Buel, “do annually
forsake the plough, and the honest profession of their fathers,
if not to win the fair, at least from an opinion, too often con-
firmed by mistaken parents, that agriculture is not the road to
wealth, to honor, nor to happiness. And such will continue to
be the case, until our agriculturists become qualified to assume
that rank in society to which the importance of their calling,
and their numbers, entitle them, and which intelligence and
self-respect can alone give them ” 3

Rank in society! That was close to the heart of the matter, for

2 Paul H. Johnstone: “Old Ideals versus New Ideas in Farm Life,” m
Farmers in a Changing World , U.S Department of Agriculture Yearbook
(Washington, 1940), p. 119. I am much indebted to this penetrating study
of the changmg identity of the American farmer.

3 Quoted by P. W. Bidwell and John I Falconer: History of Agriculture
in the Northern United States (New York, 1941), p. 205.

34

THE AGE OF REFORM

the farmer was beginning to realize acutely not merely that the
best of the world’s goods were to be had in the cities and that
the urban middle and upper classes had much more of them
than he did but also that he was losing in status and respect as
compared with them. He became aware that the official respect
paid to the farmer masked a certain disdain felt by many city
people. In time the eulogies of country life that appeared in
farm journals lost their pleasantly complacent tone and took on
some of the sharpness of a "defensive gesture against real or
imagined slurs.” 4 "There has ... a certain class of individuals
grown up in our land,” complained a farm writer in 1835, "who
treat the cultivators of the soil as an inferior caste . . . whose
utmost abilities are confined to the merit of being able to discuss
a boiled potato and a rasher of bacon.” The city was symbolized
as the home of loan sharks, dandies, fops, and aristocrats with
European ideas who despised farmers as hayseeds. One writer
spoke in a magnificent stream of mixed metaphor of "the butter-
flies who flutter over them in British broadcloth, consuming the
fruits of the sweat of their brows.” 5

The growth of the urban market intensified this antagonism.
In areas like colonial New England, where an intimate connec-
tion had existed between the small town and the adjacent coun-
tryside, where a community of interests and even of occupations
cut across the town line, the rural-urban hostility had not devel-
oped so sharply as in the newer areas where the township plan
was never instituted and where isolated farmsteads were more
common. As settlement moved west, as urban markets grew, as
self-sufficient farmers became rarer, as farmers pushed into com-
mercial production for the cities they feared and distrusted, they
quite correctly thought of themselves as a vocational and eco-
nomic group rather than as members of a neighborhood. In the
Populist era the city was totally alien territory to many farmers,
and the primacy of agriculture as a source of wealth was reas-

4 Johnstone: “Old Ideals versus New Ideas,” op. cit., p. 118.

5 Ibid., p. 118, for both quotations.

35

Chapter i: The Agrarian Myth and Commercial Realities

serted with much bitterness. “The great cities rest upon our
broad and fertile prairies,” declared Bryan in his Cross of Gold
speech. “Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your
cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms,
and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the coun-
try.” Out of the beliefs nourished by the agrarian myth there
had arisen the notion that the city was a parasitical growth on
the country. Bryan spoke for a people raised for generations on
the idea that the farmer was a very special creature, blessed by
God, and that in a country consisting largely of farmers the
voice of the farmer was the voice of democracy and of virtue
itself. The agrarian myth encouraged farmers to believe that
they were not themselves an organic part of the whole order of
business enterprise and speculation that flourished in the city,
partaking of its character and sharing in its risks, but rather the
innocent pastoral victims of a conspiracy hatched in the dis-
tance. The notion of an innocent and victimized populace colors
the whole history of agrarian controversy, and indeed the whole
history of the populistic mind.

For the farmer it was bewildering, and irritating too, to think
of the great contrast between the verbal deference paid him by
almost everyone and the real status, the real economic position,
in which he found himself. Improving his economic position was
always possible, though this was often done too little and too
late; but it was not within anyone’s power to stem the decline
in the rural values and pieties, the gradual rejection of the moral
commitments that had been expressed in the early exaltations
of agrarianism. It was the fate of the farmer himself, as we shall
see, to contribute to this decline. Like almost all good Americans
he had innocently sought progress from the very beginning, and
thus hastened the decline of many of his own values. Elsewhere
the rural classes had usually looked to the past, had been bearers
of tradition and upholders of stability. The American farmer
looked to the future alone, and the story of the American land
became a study in futures. In the very hours of its birth as a

36

THE AGE OF REFORM

nation Crevecoeur had congratulated America for having, in
effect, no feudal past and no industrial present, for having no
royal, aristocratic, ecclesiastical, or monarchical power, and no
manufacturing class, and had rapturously concluded: "We are
the most perfect society now existing in the world.” Here was
the irony from which the farmer suffered above all others: the
United States was the only country in the world that began with
perfection and aspired to progress.

ii. The Farmer and the Realities

To what extent was the agrarian myth actually false? When it
took form in America during the eighteenth century, its stereo-
types did indeed correspond to many of the realities of Ameri-
can agricultural life. There were commercial elements in co-
lonial agriculture almost from the earliest days, but there were
also large numbers of the kind of independent yeomen idealized
in the myth, men who had remarkable self-sufficiency and be-
queathed to their children a strong penchant for craftsmanlike
improvisation and a tradition of household industry. For a long
time the commercial potentialities of agriculture were held in
check by severe obstacles. Only the farmers very near to the
rivers and the towns had adequate transportation. The small
industrial population provided a very limited domestic market,
and the villagers raised a large part of their own food. Outside
the South operations above the size of the family farm were
cramped by the absence of a force of wage laborers. At the
beginning of the nineteenth century, when the American popu-
lation was still living largely in the forests, poised at the edge
of the Appalachians, and standing on the verge of the great
drive across the prairies that occupied settlers for half a century,
the yeoman was by no means a fiction.

The early panegyrists of the agrarian myth were, of course,
aware of the commercial farmers, but it was this independent

37

Chapter i: The Agrarian Myth and Commercial Realities

yeoman who caught their fancy. Admiring the natural abun-
dance produced and consumed by the family on its own farm,
they assumed that the family farm would always be, as it so
frequently was in the early days, a diversified and largely self-
sufficient unit. Even Jefferson, who was far from a humble
yeoman, and whose wants were anything but simple, succeeded
to a remarkable degree in living up to the ideal of self-suffi-
ciency. Like many planters, he numbered among his slaves a
balanced group of craftsmen; and even if the luxuries of Jeffer-
son the planter had to be imported, the necessities at least of
Jefferson the farmer, and of all his "people," were yielded by
his own land . 6 This was also the goal set by the theorists for
the yeoman. Making at home almost everything he needed,
buying little, using each year but a pocketful of cash, he would
be as independent of the marketplace as he was of the favors
of others. The yeoman, too, valued this self-sufficiency and the
savings it made possible, but he seems to have valued it more
often than not as a means through which he could eventually
enter the marketplace rather than as a means of avoiding it.
"My farm," said a farmer of Jefferson’s time, "gave me and my
family a good living on the produce of it; and left me, one year
with another, one hundred and fifty silver dollars, for I have
never spent more than ten dollars a year, which was for salt,
nails, and the like. Nothing to wear, eat, or drink was purchased,
as my farm provided all. With this saving, I put money to inter-
est, bought cattle, fatted and sold them, and made great profit ." 7
Here, then, was the significance of self-sufficiency for the char-
acteristic family farmer: "great profit." Commercialism had al-
ready begun to enter the American Arcadia.

From colonial days there had always been before the eyes of
the yeoman farmer in the settled areas alluring models of com-
mercial success in agriculture: the tobacco, rice, and indigo

6 Albert J. Nock: Jefferson (Washington, 1926), pp. 66-8; cf. Wilson
Gee. The Social Economics of Agriculture (New York, 1942), p. 39.

7 Quoted by Griswold, op. cit , p. 136.

38

THE AGE OF REFORM

planters of the South, the grain, meat, and cattle exporters of the
middle colonies. In America the spirit of emulation was excep-
tionally strong, the opportunities were considerable. The farmer
knew that without cash he could never rise above the hardships
and squalor of pioneering and log-cabin life. Self-sufficiency
produced savings, and savings went into the purchase of more
land, of herds and flocks, of better tools; they erected bams and
silos and better dwellings, and made other improvements. When
there was spare time, the farmer often worked off the farm to
add to his cash resources, at first in trapping, hunting, fishing,
or lumbering, later in the maintenance and repair of railroads.
Domestic politics were persistently affected by his desire for the
means of getting a cash crop to market, for turnpikes and canals.
The foreign policy of the early Republic was determined again
and again by the clamor of farmers to keep open the river out-
lets for American produce.

Between 1815 and 1860 the character of American agriculture
was transformed. The independent yeoman, outside of excep-
tional or isolated areas, almost disappeared before the relentless
advance of commercial agriculture. The rise of native industry
created a home market for agriculture, while at the same time
demands arose abroad, at first for American cotton and then
for American foodstuffs. A network of turnpikes, canals, and
railroads linked the planter and the advancing Western fanner
to these new markets, while the Eastern farmer, spurred by
Western competition, began to cultivate more thoroughly the
nearby urban outlets for his products. As the farmer moved out
onto the flat, rich prairies, he found possibilities for the use of
machinery that did not exist in the forest. Before long he was
cultivating the prairies with horse-drawn mechanical reapers,
steel plows, wheat and com drills, and threshers. The cash crop
converted the yeoman into a small entrepreneur, and the devel-
opment of horse-drawn machinery made obsolete the simple old
agrarian symbol of the plow. Farmers ceased to be free of what
the early agrarian writers had called the "corruptions” of trade.

Chapter i: The Agrarian Myth and Commercial Realities 39

They were, to be sure, still "independent,” in the sense that they
owned their own land. They were a hardworking lot in the old
tradition. But no longer did they grow or manufacture what
they needed: they concentrated on the cash crop and began to
buy more and more of their supplies from the country store. To
take full advantage of mechanization, they engrossed as much
land as they could. To mechanize fully, they borrowed cash.
Where they could not buy or borrow they might rent: by the
1850’s Illinois farmers who could not afford machines and large
barns were hiring itinerant jobbers with machines to do their
threshing. The shift from self-sufficient to commercial farming
varied in time throughout the West and cannot be dated with
precision, but it was complete in Ohio by about 1830 and twenty
years later in Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. All through the
great Northwest, farmers whose ancestors might have lived in
isolation and self-sufficiency were surrounded by jobbers, banks,
stores, middlemen, horses, and machinery; and in so far as this
process was unfinished in 1860, the demands of the Civil War
brought it to completion. As the Prairie Farmer said in 1868:
"The old rule that a farmer should produce all that he required,
and that the surplus represented his gains, is part of the past.
Agriculture, like all other business, is better for its subdivisions,
each one growing that which is best suited to his soil, skill,
climate and market, and with its proceeds purchasing] his
other needs.” 8

The triumph of commercial agriculture not only rendered ob-
solete the objective conditions that had given to the agrarian

8 Quoted by Paul H. Johnstone: “On the Identification of the Farmer,”
Rural Sociology , Vol. V (March 1940), p. 39. For this transformation in
agriculture, see Bidwell and Falconer, op. cit., pp 126-32, 164-5, chapters
xni, xix, xxiii, and Everett E. Edwards: “Amencan Agnculture — the First
300 Years,” in Farmers in a Changing World , esp. pp. 202-8, 213-22,
228-32. On the foreign market see Edwin G. Nourse. American Agricul-
ture and the European Market (New York, 1924), pp. 8-16, and on the
disappearance of household industry, Rolla M. Try on* Household Manu-
factures in the United States , 1640-1860 (Chicago, 1917), chapters vii
and vm.

40

THE AGE OF REFORM

myth so much of its original force, but also showed that the ideal
implicit in the myth was contesting the ground with another,
even stronger ideal — the notion of opportunity, of career, of the
self-made man. The same forces in American life that had made
Jacksonian equahtarianism possible and had given to the equali-
tarian theme in the agrarian romance its most compelling appeal
had also unleashed in the nation an entrepreneurial zeal proba-
bly without precedent in history, a rage for business, for profits,
for opportunity, for advancement. If the yeoman family was to
maintain itself m the simple terms eulogized in the myth, it had
to produce consistently a type of character that was satisfied
with a traditional way of life. Rut the Yankee farmer, continually
exposed to the cult of success that was everywhere around him,
became inspired by a kind of personal dynamism which called
upon the individual to surpass traditions. He was, in terms that
David Riesman has made familiar, not a tradition-directed but
an inner-directed man . 9 Agrarian sentiment sanctified labor in
the soil and the simple life, but the prevailing Calvinist atmos-
phere of rural life implied that virtue was rewarded, after all,
with success and material goods.

From the standpoint of the familiar agrarian panegyrics, the
supreme irony was that the immense interior that had been
supposed to underwrite the dominion of the yeoman for centu-
ries did as much as anything else to destroy the yeomanlike
spirit and replace it with the spirit of the businessman, even of
the gambler. Cheap land invited extensive and careless culti-
vation. Rising land values in areas of new settlement tempted
early liquidation and frequent moves, and made of the small
entrepreneur a land speculator. Already in the late eighteenth

9 David Riesman: The Lonely Crowd (New Haven, 1950). It should be
added, however, that the idea of career, as it reached country youth be-
fore the Civil War, was strongly tinctured by Yankee intellectualism and
did not as yet exalt businessmen Farm boys were encouraged to emulate
inventors, scientists, writers, philosophers, and military figures. Of course
all these pointed toward urban life. Johnstone: “Old Ideals versus New
Ideas,” pp. 137-8.

41

Chapter i: The Agrarian Myth and Commercial Realities

century writers on American agriculture noticed that American
farmers were tempted to buy more land than they could prop-
erly cultivate. George Washington wrote apologetically to
Arthur Young about the state of American farming, admitting
that "the aim of farmers in this country, if they can be called
farmers, is not to make the most they can from the land, which
is, or has been cheap, but the most of the labour, which is dear;
the consequence of which has been, much ground has been
scratched over and none cultivated or improved as it ought to
have been. . . .” 1 This tendency was strengthened by the rapid
march of settlement across the prairies. In 1818 the English
immigrant Morris Birkbeck wrote from Illinois that merchants,
professional men, and farmers alike were investing their profits
and savings in uncultivated land. "The farmer, instead of com-
pleting the improvement of his present possessions, lays out all
he can save in entering more land. In a district which is settling,
this speculation is said to pay on the average, when managed
with judgment, fifteen per cent. Who then will submit to the
toils of agriculture, further than bare necessity requires, for
fifteen per cent? Or who would loan his money, even at fifteen
per cent, where he can obtain that interest by investing it in
land? Thus every description of men, almost every man, is poor
in convertible property.” 2

Frequent and sensational rises in land values bred a boom
psychology in the American farmer and caused him to rely for
his margin of profit more on the process of appreciation than
on the sale of crops. It took a strong man to resist the temptation
to ride skyward on lands that might easily triple or quadruple
their value in one decade and then double again in the next. 3 It
seemed ultraconservative to improve existing possessions if one
could put savings or borrowings into new land. What developed

1 Bidwell and Falconer, op. cit, p. 119.

2 Ibid, p. 154, cf. pp. 82-3, 115, 166

3 Benjamin H. Hibbard: History of Agriculture in Dane County , Wis-
consin (Madison, 1904), pp. 195 ff.

42

THE AGE OF REFORM

in America was an agricultural society whose real attachment
was not to the land but to land values. In the 1830’s Tocqueville
found this the prevailing characteristic of American agriculture:
"Almost all the farmers of the United States combine some trade
with agriculture; most of them make agriculture itself a trade.
It seldom happens that an American farmer settles for good
upon the land which he occupies: especially in the districts of
the far West he brings land into tillage in order to sell it again,
and not to farm it: he builds a farmhouse on the speculation
that, as the state of the country will soon be changed by the
increase of population, a good price will be gotten for it. . . .
Thus the Americans carry their business-like qualities into agri-
culture; and their trading passions are displayed in that as in
their other pursuits.” 4

The penchant for speculation and the lure of new and differ-
ent lands bred in the American farmer a tremendous passion for
moving — and not merely, as one common view would have it,
on the part of those who had failed, but also on the part of those
who had succeeded. For farmers who had made out badly, the
fresh lands may have served on occasion as a safety valve, but
for others who had made out well enough on a speculative basis,
or who were beginning a farming "career,” it was equally a risk
valve — an opportunity to exploit the full possibilities of the
great American land bubble. Mobility among farmers had seri-
ous effects upon an agricultural tradition never noted for careful
cultivation: in a nation whose soil is notoriously heterogeneous,
farmers too often had little chance to get to know the quality
of their land; they failed to plan and manure and replenish; they
neglected diversification for the one-crop system and ready
cash. 5 There was among them little attachment to land or lo~

4 Democracy in America (New York, ed 1899), Vol. II, p. 644.

5 Some aspects of agrarian mobility and mechanized agriculture for the
market are discussed by James C. Malm m “Mobility and History,” Agri-
cultural History , Vol XVII (October 1943), pp. 177-91. The general char-
acteristics of American agriculture in the period after the Civil War are

Chapter i: The Agrarian Myth and Commercial Realities 43

cality; instead there developed the false euphoria of local “boost-
ing,” encouraged by railroads, land companies, and fanners
themselves; in place of village contacts and communal spirit
based upon ancestral attachments, there was professional opti-
mism based upon hopes for a quick rise in values . 6

In a very real and profound sense, then, the United States
failed to develop ( except in some localities, chiefly in the East ) 7
a distinctively rural culture. If a rural culture means an emo-
tional and craftsmanlike dedication to the soil, a traditional and
pre-capitalist outlook, a tradition-directed rather than career-
directed type of character, and a village community devoted to
ancestral ways and habitually given to communal action, then
the prairies and plains never had one. What differentiated the
agricultural life of these regions from the practices widespread
in European agriculture — or, for that matter, from the stereo-
type of the agrarian myth — was not simply that it produced for
a market but that it was so speculative, so mobile, so mecha-
nized, so “progressive,” so thoroughly imbued with the com-
mercial spirit.

Immigrant farmers, who really were yeomen with a back-
ground of genuine agrarian values, were frequently bewildered
at the ethos of American agriculture. Marcus Hansen points out:
“The ambition of the German-American father, for instance, was
to see his sons on reaching manhood established with their fami-
lies on farms clustered about his own. To take complete posses-

discussed by Fred A. Shannon: The Farmer's Last Frontier (New York,
1945), passim .

6 Thorstem Veblen, who not only wrote about farmers as an economist
but lived among them, deals penetratmgly with “the independent farmer”
and “the country town” in Absentee Ownership (New York, 1923), pp.
1.20-65.

7 Compare Arthur F. Raper’s account of the people of these localities
in Carl C. Taylor et al : Rural Life m the United States (New York, 1949),
chapter xxvi, with the similar picture of the old yeoman farmer. For an
excellent account of the transformation m farming by one who saw it at
both ends, see Rodney Welch: “The Farmer’s Changed Condition,”
Forum, Vol. X (February 1891), pp. 689-700.

44

THE AGE OF REFORM

sion of a township with sons, sons-in-law and nephews was not
an unrealizable ideal. To this end the would-be patriarch dedi-
cated all his plodding industry. One by one, he bought adjacent
farms, the erstwhile owners joining the current to the farther
West. Heavily timbered acres and swamp lands which had been
lying unused were prepared for cultivation by patient and un-
ceasing toil. When the German comes in, the Yankee goes out/
was a local proverb that varied as Swedes, Bohemians or other
immigrant groups formed the invading element. But the Ameri-
can father made no such efforts on behalf of his offspring. To
be a self-made man was his ideal. He had come in as a "first
settler and had created a farm with his ax; let the boys do the
same. One of them perhaps was kept at home as a helper to his
aging parents; the rest set out to achieve beyond the mountains
or beyond the river what the father had accomplished in the
West of his day. Thus mobility was fostered by family policy ” 8
The continuing influx of immigrants, ready to settle on cleared
and slightly improved land, greatly facilitated the Yankee race
across the continent . 9

American agriculture was also distinguishable from European
agriculture in the kind of rural life and political culture it sus-
tained. In Europe the managers of agriculture and the owners
of land were characteristically either small peasant proprietors,
or substantial landholders of traditional and conservative out-
look with powerful political and military connections. The
American fanner, whose holdings were not so extensive as those
of the grandee nor so tiny as those of the peasant, whose psy-
chology was Protestant and bourgeois, and whose politics were

8 Marcus Lee Hansen: The Immigrant in American History (Cam-
bridge, 1940), pp. 61-2.

9 Ibid., pp. 63—71. I do not wish to imply that the immigrant was in
every respect the superior fanner. He took better care of the land, but was
not so quick as the Yankee to take advantage of mechanization or scientific
fanning. This pattern persisted for a long time. See John A Hawgood:
The Tragedy of German-America (New York, 1940), chapter i, esp. pp.
26-33, Edmund de S. Brunner: Immigrant Farmers and Their Children
(New York, 1929), chapter u.

45

Chapter i. The Agrarian Myth and Commercial Realities

petty-capitalist rather than traditionalist, had no reason to share
the social outlook of the rural classes of Europe. In Europe land
was limited and dear, while labor was abundant and relatively
cheap; in America this ratio between land and labor was in-
verted. In Europe small farmers lived in villages, where gener-
ations of the same family were reared upon the same soil, and
where careful cultivation and the minute elimination of waste
were necessary to support a growing population on a limited
amount of land. Endless and patient labor, including the labor
of peasant women and children exploited to a degree to which
the Yankee would not go except under the stress of pioneering
conditions, was available to conserve and tailor the land and
keep it fertile. On limited plots cultivated by an ample labor
force, the need for machinery was not urgent, and hence the
demand for liquid capital in large amounts was rare. Diversifi-
cation, self-sufficiency, and the acceptance of a low standard of
living also contributed to hold down this demand. Much mana-
gerial skill was required for such an agricultural regime, but it
was the skill of the craftsman and the traditional tiller of the
soil. Village life provided a community and a co-operative mi-
lieu, a pooling of knowledge and lore, a basis of common action
to minimize risks.

In America the greater availability of land and the scarcity
of labor made for extensive agriculture, which was wasteful of
the soil, and placed a premium on machines to bring large tracts
under cultivation. His demand for expensive machinery, his
expectation of higher standards of living, and his tendency to go
into debt to acquire extensive acreage created an urgent need
for cash and tempted the farmer into capitalizing more and
more on his greatest single asset: the unearned appreciation in
the value of his land. The managerial skill required for success
under these conditions was as much businesslike as craftsman-
like. The predominance in American agriculture of the isolated
farmstead standing in the midst of great acreage, the frequent
movements, the absence of village life, deprived the farmer and

46

THE AGE OF REFORM

his family of the advantages of community, lowered the chances
of association and co-operation, and encouraged that rampant,
suspicious, and almost suicidal individualism for which the
American farmer was long noted and which organizations like
the Grange tried to combat. 1 The characteristic product of
American rural society was not a yeoman or a villager, but a
harassed little country businessman who worked very hard,
moved all too often, gambled with his land, and made his way
alone.

in. The Frontier or the Market?

The American farmer was unusual in the agricultural world in
the sense that he was running a mechanized and commercialized
agricultural unit of a size far greater than the small proprietary
holdings common elsewhere, and yet he was running it as a
family enterprise on the assumption that the family could supply
not only the necessary capital and managerial talent but also
most of the labor. This system, however applicable to the sub-
sistence farm or the small yeoman s farm, was hardly adequate
to the conditions of commercial agriculture. 2 As a businessman,
the farmer was appropriately hardheaded, he tried to act upon
a cold and realistic strategy of self-interest. As the head of a
family, however, the farmer felt that he was investing not only
his capital but his hard work and that of his wife and children,
that when he risked his farm he risked his home — that he was,
in short, a single man running a personal enterprise in a world
of impersonal forces. It was from this aspect of his situation —
seen in the hazy glow of the agrarian myth — that his political
leaders in the 1890’s developed their rhetoric and some of their
concepts of political action. The farmer s commercial position

1 There is an excellent comparison of American and European agricul-
ture m Wilson Gee, op cit., chapter ni.

2 Malm: “Mobility and History,” pp. 182 ff.

47

Chapter i: The Agrarian Myth and Commercial Realities

pointed to the usual strategies of the business world: combina-
tion, co-operation, pressure politics, lobbying, piecemeal activity
directed toward specific goals. But the bathos of the agrarian
rhetoric pointed in a different direction: broad political goals,
ideological mass politics, third parties, the conquest of the
"money power,” the united action of all labor, rural and urban.
When times were persistently bad, the farmer tended to reject
his business role and its failures to withdraw into the role of the
injured little yeoman. This made the differences between his
situation and that of any other victim of exploitation seem un-
important to him. As a Southern journalist wrote of the situation
in the cotton country: "The landowner was so poor and dis-
tressed that he forgot that he was a capitalist ... so weary of
hand and sick of spirit that he imagined himself in precisely the
same plight as the hired man. ...” 3

The American farmer thus had a dual character, and one way
of understanding our agrarian movements is to observe which
aspect of the farmer’s double personality is uppermost at a given
time. It is my contention that both the Populist rhetoric and the
modern liberal’s indulgent view of the farmers’ revolt have been
derived from the "soft” side of the farmers existence — that is,
from agrarian "radicalism” and agrarian ideology — while most
farm organizations since the decline of the Populists have been
based primarily upon the "hard” side, upon agricultural im-
provement, business methods, and pressure politics. Populism
itself had a hard side, especially in the early days of the Farm-
ers’ Alliance and the Populist Party, but this became less and
less important as the depression of the nineties deepened and
other issues were dropped in favor of the silver panacea.

Most of our views of the historical significance of Populism

3 Quoted by C. Vann Woodward: Origins of the New South (Baton
Rouge, 1951), p. 194. During the late 1880’s, when farm discontent was
not yet at its peak, such farm organizations as the Farmers’ Alliances de-
veloped limited programs based upon economic self-interest, m the 1890’s,
when discontent became most acute, it produced a national third-party
movement.

48

THE AGE OF REFORM

have been formed by the study of the frontier process and the
settlement of the internal empire. This approach turned atten-
tion to some significant aspects of American agrarian develop-
ment, but also diverted attention from others. To a writer like
Frederick Jackson Turner the farmer on the plains was signifi-
cant above all as the carrier of the tiaditions of the frontier. To
Turner the frontier, or the West, was the primary source of
most of <£ what has been distinctive and valuable in America’s
contributions to the history of the human spirit. . . .” 4 Hence
the primary interest of the Populist lay in the fact that he was
"a survival of the pioneer, striving to adjust present conditions
to his old ideals.” 5 While Turner did on occasion comment on
the capitalistic and speculative character of the farmer, he saw
this as something of no special importance, when compared with
the farmer’s role as the bearer of the yeoman tradition and “the
old pioneer ideals of the native American. ...” 6 The chief dif-
ference between Populist thinking and the pioneer tradition,
Turner felt, was that the Populists showed an increasing sense
of the need for governmental help in realizing the old ideals.
His explanation of this change in philosophy — indeed, of the
entire agiarian revolt of the 1890’s — was formulated in the light
of the frontier theory and the alleged exhaustion of “free” land.
“Failures in one area can no longer be made good by taking up
land on a new frontier,” he wrote in 1896. “The conditions of
settled society are being reached with suddenness and with con-
fusion. . . . The frontier opportunities are gone. Discontent is
demanding an extension of governmental activity in its behalf.

. . . A people composed of heterogeneous materials, with di-

4 Frederick Jackson Turner. The Frontier in American History (New
York, 1920, ed., 1947), preface, p n, cf. pp. 211, 266.

5 Ibid , p. 155

6 Ibid., p. 148. Note his comments on another writer's characterization
of the commercial nature of settlement, p. 211. Turner himself, it should
perhaps be added, was not a Populist. He disapproved of the “lax financial
integrity” of the Populists, though he thought it was too much to expect “a

E nmitive society” to show “an intelligent appreciation of the complexity of
usraess interests m a developed society.” Ibid., p. 32.

49

Chapter i: The Agrarian Myth and Commercial Realities

verse and conflicting ideals and social interests, having passed
from the task of filling up the vacant spaces of the continent, is
now thrown back upon itself and is seeking an equilibrium.” 7
The idea that the agrarian uprising was precipitated by the dis-
appearance of the frontier and the exhaustion of the public
domain has also been given the scholarly support of John D.
Hicks’s standard history of The Populist Revolt . Earlier discon-
tents, Hicks concluded, had been lightened by the departure of
the restless and disgruntled for the West, a process that created
new opportunities for them and eased the pressure on those they
left behind. But by the nineties, "with the lands all taken and
the frontier gone, this safety valve was closed. The frontier was
turned back on itself. The restless and discontented voiced their
sentiments more and fled from them less.” 8

The conclusion that it was the West, the frontier spirit, that
produced American democracy, and that Populism was the
logical product of this spirit, is a deceptive inheritance from the
Turnerian school. The decisive role played by the South in
Populism suggests instantly the limitations of this view. Terms
that are superficially appealing when applied to Kansas become
meaningless when applied to Georgia. Southern Populism,
which could hardly have been close to the frontier spirit, was at
least as strong as the Western brand and contained the more
radical wing of the agrarian revolt of the nineties. 9 Moreover,
the extent to which "the West” as a whole supported the agrar-
ian revolt has commonly been exaggerated, as the distribution
of Populist votes in 1892 and of Bryan votes in 1896 clearly

7 Ibid., pp. 219-21; cf. pp 147-8, 218, 276-7, 305-6.

8 John D. Hicks The Populist Revolt (Minneapolis, 1931), p 95; cf.
also p. vn. “The role of the fanner m American history has always been
prominent, but it was only as the West wore out and cheap lands were no
longer abundant that well-developed agranan movements began to ap-
pear.” But the Granger movement of the 1870’s, while it may perhaps be
dismissed as an undeveloped agrarian movement, manifested acute agrar-
ian unrest long before the disappearance of the frontier hne m 1890

9 Woodward: Origins of the New South , p. 200; cf. pp. 277-8 on the
greater staying power of Southern Populism.

50

THE AGE OF REFORM

shows. 1 Populism had only three compact centers. Each was
overwhelmingly rural. Each was dominated by a product whose
price had catastrophically declined: the South, based chiefly
upon cotton; a narrow tier of four Northwestern states, Kansas,
Nebraska, and the two Dakotas, based upon wheat; and the
mountain states, based chiefly upon silver. Silver is a special
case, though strategically an important one, and we can for the
moment postpone consideration of it, except to remark that the
free-silver Populism of the mountain-states variety was not
agrarian Populism at all, but simply silverism. Elsewhere agrar-
ian discontent, where it reached a peak of local intensity suf-
ficient to yield an independent Populist Party of notable
strength or to win a state for Bryan in 1896, was roughly co-
terminous with the cash-staple export crops and the burden of
heavy mortgage indebtedness.

The common tendency to focus upon the internal frontier as
the matrix of Populism has obscured the great impoitance of the
agrarian situation in the external world, which is profoundly
relevant to both Southern and Western Populism. The frontier
obsession has been identified in America with a kind of intel-
lectual isolationism. 2 The larger and more important answer to
the causes of the agrarian crisis of the 1890’s must be found not
in the American West, but in the international market. While
American Populism has been seen almost solely in terms of
domestic events and the internal frontier, the entire European
and American world was shaken by an agrarian crisis that knew
no national boundaries and that struck at several nations with-
out internal frontiers on the verge of real or imagined exhaus-
tion. "Almost everywhere,” declared an English observer in

1 See chapter lii, section 1.

2 As an illustration of the misleading consequences of the “closed space”
obsession, see Turner’s comment m 1910 that “the pressure of population
upon the food supply is already felt.” Op. cit., p. 279. This at a time when
the United States was rapidly losmg its place m the world market because
of a surfeit of total world agricultural production. Nourse, op. cit., pp. 28-
42.

Chapter i. The Agrarian Myth and Commercial Realities 51

1893, “certainly in England, France, Germany, Italy, Scandina-
via, and the United States, the agriculturists, formerly so in-
stinctively conservative, are becoming fiercely discontented, de-
clare they gain less by civilization than the rest of the commu-
nity, and are looking about for remedies of a drastic nature.” 3

During the last three decades of the nineteenth century a
revolution took place in international communications. For the
first time the full effects of steam locomotion and steam naviga-
tion were felt in international trade. In 1869 the Suez Canal was
opened and the first transcontinental railroad in the United
States was completed. Europe was connected by submarine
cable with the United States in 1866, and with South America in
1874. A great network of telegraph and telephone communica-
tion was spun throughout the world. Huge tracts of new land
being settled in Argentina, Australia, Canada, and the American
West were now pulled together in one international market,
while improvements in agricultural technology made possible
the full exploitation of areas susceptible to extensive and
mechanized cultivation. Agrarian depressions, formerly of a
local or national character, now became international, and with
them came international agrarian discontent, heightened by the
almost uninterrupted international price decline that occurred
from the early 1870’s to the 1890’s. 4 It is hardly accidental that

3 Quoted from Spectator , Vol LXX, p. 247, by C. F. Emerick, "An
Analysis of Agricultural Discontent in the Umted States,” Political Science
Quarterly , Vol. XI (September 1896), p. 433; see this series of articles for
a valuable contemporary account of the mtemational aspect of agricultural
upheaval, ibid., pp. 433-63, 601-39, Vol. XII (1897), pp. 93-127.

4 For a review of the literature on the Communication Revolution, see
Lee Benson: "The Historical Background of Tumer’s Frontier Essay,”
Agricultural History, Vol. XXV (April 1951), pp. 59-64. The point of view
expressed here was originally stated by James C. Malin: "Notes on the
Literature of Populism,” Kansas Historical Quarterly, Vol. I (February
1932), pp. 160-4, the term "Communication Revolution” was first used by
Robert G. Albion: "The 'Communication Revolution/ ” American Historical
Review, Vol. XXXVII (July 1932), pp 718-20 See also Hans Rosenberg:
"Political and Social Consequences of the Great Depression of 1873-1896
in Central Europe,” Economic History Review, Vol. XIII (1943), pp. 58-
73.

52

THE AGE OF REFORM

the products of the American staple-growing regions showing
the highest discontent were the products most dependent upon
exports. 5

The notion that the unavailability of free land for further ex-
pansion of the American fanning system was chiefly responsible
for the remarkable surge of agrarian discontent no longer seems
credible. It is true that many Americans, including some Popu-
list spokesmen, were concerned during the 1890’s about what
they thought to be the imminent disappearance of the public
domain. 6 There was also a school of thought among those in-
terested in the agrarian problem that took pleasure in the pros-
pect that the approaching exhaustion of new lands would lower
the expansion of the agricultural economy to the point at which
the values of already settled land would begin to rise sharply,
and thus put an end to the problem of settled farmers. 7 How-
ever, the entire conception of exhausted resources has been re-
examined and found to be delusive; actually an abundance of
new land was available long after the so-called disappearance
of the frontier in 1890. During the decade 1890-1900, in which
the discontent was most acute, 1,100,000 new farms were set-
tled, 500,000 more than the number in the previous decade. In
the twenty years after the farmers’ organizations met in 1890 at
Ocala, Florida, to formulate their demands, 1,760,000 new farms
and 225,600,000 new acres were added to the nation s agricul-

5 Wheat-growers were dependent for about 30 to 40 per cent of their
gross annual income upon the export market, cotton-growers for about 70
per cent; raisers of pork and pork products for about 15 to 23 per cent.
Frederick Strauss. 'The Composition of Gross Farm Income since the Civil
War,” National Bureau of Economic Research Bulletin No. 78 (April 28,
1940), esp. pp. 15-18.

6 Cf. Senator Wilham A. PefFer as quoted by Elizabeth N. Barr m Wil-
liam E Connelley, ed.: A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans (Chi-
cago, 1919), Vol. II, p. 1159, Hamlin Garland* Jason Edwards (Boston,
1892), p. v, Mary E. Lease: The Problem of Cimlization Soloed (Chicago,
1895), pp. 177-8.

7 An excellent account of speculations about the approaching exhaustion
of the pubhc domain is given by Benson, op. cit , pp. 59-82.

Chapter i: The Agrarian Myth and Commercial Realities 53

tural domain. 8 More land, indeed, was taken up after 1890 under
the terms of the Homestead Act and its successors than had
been taken up before. True, a high proportion of this was suit-
able only for grazing and dry farming, but the profitability of
land is a result not merely of soil chemistry or soil humidity
but also of the economic circumstances under which the land is
cultivated; the condition of the market in the early years of the
twentieth century admitted of more profitable cultivation of
these relatively barren lands than of much richer lands in the
depressed period. Finally, there were after 1890 still more sup-
plies of rich land in Canada, which farmers from the United
States did not hesitate to occupy. In 1914, Canadian officials es-
timated that 925,000 Americans had moved, chiefly during the
sixteen years past, across the border to the lands of Alberta and
Saskatchewan. 9 Lavish opportunities to settle on new lands or
open new acres were still available after 1890, 1 and in fact much
use was made of these opportunities during the nineties. In so
far as farmers were deterred from further settlement, it was not
by the absence of land but because the international agrarian
depression made the nineties a hazardous time to begin a farm.

The conception that the end of free or cheap land was pri-

8 A. W. Zelomek and Irving Mark: “Historical Perspectives for Post-
War Agricultural Forecasts/' Rural Sociology , Vol. X (March 1945), p. 51;
cf. Final Report of the Industrial Commission (Washington, 1902), Vol.
XIX, pp. 58, 105-6; Benjamin H. Hibbard: A History of the Public Land
Policies (New York, 1924), pp. 396-8.

9 Marcus L. Hansen and J. Bartlet Brebner: The Mingling of the Cana-
dian and American Peoples (New York, 1940), pp. 219-35; Paul F. Sharp:
The Agrarian Revolt in Western Canada (Minneapolis, 1948), pp. 1-8, 17.

1 As late as 1913, when David F. Houston became Wilson’s Secretary
of Agriculture, he found that “less than 60 per cent of our arable land was
under cultivation, and of the land under cultivation not more than 12 per
cent was yielding reasonably full returns/' Eight Years with Wilsons Cabi-
net (New York, 1926), Vol. I, p. 200. The largest number of final entnes
under the Homestead Act came in 1913, almost a quarter century after the
alleged disappearance of the frontier. During World War I it was still pos-
sible to expand crop acreages very substantially even within states long
settled. See Lloyd P. Jorgensen: “Agricultural Expansion," Agricultural
History , Vol. XXIII (January 1949), pp. 30-40.

54

THE AGE OF REFORM

marily responsible for precipitating discontent implies that the
existence of such land had been effective in alleviating it, and
suggests that the effects of the Homestead Act up to about 1890
were what had been hoped for at the time of its passage. But
the Homestead Act had never been successful in creating the in-
land freehold empire that agrarian reformeis had dreamed of.
Its maladministration and its circumvention by speculators and
railroads is by now well known. From 1860 to 1900, for every
free farm entered and kept by a bona fide farmer under the
act there were about nine bought from railroads or speculators
or from the government itself. 2 Speculators, engrossing immense
tracts of land under the privilege of unrestricted “entry,” which
was not abolished until 1888, did far more damage to rural so-
ciety in the West than merely transmitting “free” land to farm-
ers at substantial prices. They drove immigrants to remote parts
of the frontier; they created “speculators’ deserts” — large tracts
of uncultivated absentee-owned land — and thus added to the
dispersal of the population, making the operation of roads and
railroads far more costly than necessary; they refused to pay
taxes, thus damaging local government finances and limiting
local improvements; they added to all the characteristic evils of
our rural culture while they built up land prices and kept a large
portion of the farm population in a state of tenancy. 3

The promise of free Homestead land or cheap land was self-
defeating. The Homestead Act itself, which required five years
of residence before title to a free farm was granted, was based
upon the assumption that settlement would take place in a

2 Fred A. Shannon: The Farmers Last Frontier (New York, 1945), pp.
51, 55. Shannon estimates that about 400,000 farms were alienated under
Homestead terms during a period m which 3,730,000 new farms were
created.

3 Paul Wallace Gates: “Land Policy and Tenancy in the Prairie States,”
Journal of Economic History , Vol. I (May 1941), pp. 60-82, see also his
“The Homestead Act m an Incongruous Land System,” American Histori-
cal Review , Vol. XLI (July 1936), pp. 652r-81.

Chapter i: The Agrarian Myth and Commercial Realities 55

gradual and stable way, after the manner of the mythical yeo-
man. It made no allowance for the mobile habits of the Ameri-
can farmer. 4 The number of forfeited entries under the Home-
stead Act was extraordinary. What effect the Homestead Act
might have had if the West had been gradually settled by yeo-
man farmers protected from speculators and living after the
fashion of the myth seems no more than a utopian conjecture.
As it worked out, the Homestead Act was a triumph for specu-
lative and capitalistic forces, and it translated cheap or free
land into a stimulus for more discontent that it could quiet. The
promise of the Homestead Act was a lure for over-rapid settle-
ment in regions where most settlers found, instead of the agrar-
ian utopia, a wilderness of high costs, low returns, and mort-
gages.

The self-defeating tendency of relatively cheap land in a
speculative society is perfectly illustrated in an intensive con-
temporary study of a Nebraska township by Arthur F. Bentley.
This township was first settled in 1871-2. In the early days when
land prices were low, there was a prosperous period of rapid
settlement, and the farmer s rate of profit was high whenever he
had good crops; this encouraged him to buy and work more
land than he could properly manage. The rapid appreciation of
the price of land led him to try to realize his gains in advance by
mortgaging. As fast as he could increase his loan he would do so,
using the funds either to pay temporary losses or for further in-
vestment or speculation. “It is true,” Bentley observed, “the
farmer may often have suffered from excessive interest and
grasping creditors; but it was less frequently the avarice of the
lender that got him into trouble than the fact that he was too
sanguine and too prone to believe that he could safely go into
debt, on the assumption that crops and prices in the future

4 Malm: “Mobility and History,” pp 181-2. For the maladministration
of the Homestead Act, see Hoy M. Robbins: Our Landed Heritage (Prince-
ton, 1942), part III.

56

THE AGE OF REFORM

would equal those in the present.” 5 At any rate, the typical
farmer soon found himself in such a vulnerable position that
one bad crop year or a brief tempoiary cessation of increase in
land values, such as that of 1890-1, would put him on the verge
of failure. Those farmers who came in early and took govern-
ment land, who managed with some skill and got clear of heavy
debt, made out well; those who came later, took railroad land,
and made the usual errors of management were in straits. 6 By
1892, when Bentley made his study, he concluded that a
would-be pui chaser who did not have enough capital to buy his
farm outright and to hold it over subsequent periods of hard
times “had almost better throw his money away than invest it
in farming operations in Nebraska at the current pi ices of land
and under the present agrieultuial conditions, unless, he be pos-
sessed of unusual energy and ability.” 7

It is evident that Western Populism was, among other things,
the outgrowth of a period of incredible expansion, one of the
gieatest m the world histoiy of agriculture. From 1870 to 1900
more new faim land was taken up than in all previous American
history. s By the mid-eighties a feverish land boom was under
way, and it is the collapse of this boom that provides the im-
mediate background of Western Populism. We may take the ex-
perience of Kansas as illustrative. The boom, originally based on
the high prices of farm produce, had reached the point of arti-
ficial inflation by 1885. It had swept not only the country, where
the rapid advance in prices had caused latecomers to buy and
mortgage at hopelessly inflated values, but also the rising towns,

5 Arthur F. Bentley: The Condition of the Western Farmer as Illus-
trated by the Economic History of a Nebraska Township (Baltimore,
1893), p. 46, for substantial evidence that the speculative and nsk-ridden
character of Western settlement could be as important as “the avarice of
the lender,” see Allan G. Bogue: “The Land Mortgage Company m the
Early Plains States,” Agricultural History , Vol. XXV (January 1951), pp.
20-33.

6 Bentley, op. cit., pp. 46, 68, 76, 79, 80.

7 Ibid., pp. 69-70.

8 Land in farms rose from 407,735,000 acres m 1870 to 838,592,000 in
1900.

57

Chapter x: The Agrarian Myth and Commercial Realities

which were all “bonded to the limit for public improvements
[and] public utilities.” 9 As a state official later remarked, “Most
of us crossed the Mississippi or Missouri with no money but
with a vast wealth of hope and courage. . . . Haste to get rich
has made us borrowers, and the borrower has made booms, and
booms made men wild, and Kansas became a vast insane asylum
covering 80,000 square miles.” 1 In the winter of 1887-8 this
boom, which had been encouraged by railroads, newspapers,
and public officials, abruptly collapsed — in part because of
drought in the western third of the state, in part because farm
prices had stopped going up, and in part because the self-
created confidence upon which the fever fed had broken.

The fathers of the Homestead Act and the fee-simple empire
had acted upon a number of assumptions stemming from the
agrarian myth which were out of date even before the act was
passed. They trusted to the beneficence of nature, to permanent
and yeomanlike nonspeculative settlement; they expected that
the land really would pass without cost into the hands of the
great majority of settlers; and they took it for granted that
the native strength of the farmer would continue to rest upon
the abundance produced on and for the farm. These assumptions
were incongruous with the Industrial Revolution that was al-
ready well under way by 1862 and with the Communications
Revolution that was soon to come; they were incongruous even
with the natural character of the plains, with their winds, sand-
storms, droughts, and grasshoppers. And the farmer, caught in
the toils of cash-crop commercial farming, did not, and could
not, reckon his prosperity by the abundance produced on the
farm but rather by the exchange value of his products as meas-
ured by the supplies and services they could buy. His standard

9 William Allen White* Autobiography (New York, 1946), p 187.

1 Quoted in Raymond C Miller: The Populist Party in Kansas , ms.
Ph.D. dissertation. University of Chicago, 1928, p. 22; cf. Miller’s article:
‘The Background of Populism m Kansas,” Mississippi Valley Historical Re-
view, Vol. II (March 1925), pp. 474-85; Hicks, op. cit., chapter i, has a
good bnef account of the speculative background.

58

THE AGE OF REFORM

of living, as well as the security of his home, became dependent
upon his commercial position, which in turn was dependent
upon the vicissitudes of the world market . 2

In pointing to the farmer s commercial role I am not trying
to deny the difficulties of his position or the reality and serious-
ness of his grievances: the appreciation of debts through de-
flation, the high cost of credit, inequitable tax burdens, dis-
criminatory railroad rates , 3 unreasonable elevator and storage
charges. Populism can best be understood, however, not as a
product of the frontier inheritance, but as another episode in
the well-established tradition of American enterpreneurial radi-
calism, which goes back at least to the Jacksonian era . 4 It was
an effort on the part of a few important segments of a highly
heterogeneous capitalistic agriculture to restore profits in the

2 The farmer himself was not content to be told that his living standards
had improved, because he looked to his commercial welfare as well. Disap-
pointments are relative to expectations. While enduring the short-lived
rigors of frontier existence, the farmer lived on expectation and hope, ac-
cepting present sacrifices m the interest of a future that seemed rosy to
the mind of the boomer. Once tins stage was passed, he assumed that his
living standards would rise materially and was irritated at the very sugges-
tion that this alone should satisfy him. Cf. Bentley, op. cit., p. 87; Henri-
etta M. Larson: The Wheat Market and the Farmer in Minnesota , 1858-
1900 (New York, 1926), p. 167.

3 Concerning the place of freight rates in the background of the farmer's
situation, Theodore Saloutos has reinforced a reservation advanced much
earlier by Charles F Adams, Jr.: “Historians have repeatedly attributed
the plight of the farmers, at least in part, to high freight rates, yet available
figures show conclusively that the rates dropped drastically during the last
half of the nineteenth century, while the farmers' returns failed to show
anything commensurate with the drop in rates. Many farmers attributed
the sagging prices to these alleged extortionate rates, but by doing so they
overlooked the fact that it was these lower rates that had made it possible
for them to reach markets which were formerly considered incredible . . .
rates that in many other countries would have been considered incredibly
low.” See the rest of the argument in Saloutos’s astute article: “The Agri-
cultural Problem and Nineteenth-Century Industrialism,” Agricultural His-
tory , Vol. XXI (July 1948), p. 167. On this issue, however, see Shannon:
The Farmers Last Frontier , pp. 295-302.

4 For die entrepreneurial interpretation of Jacksonian democracy see the
review by Bray Hammond, Journal of Economic History , Vol. VI (May
1946), pp. 78-84, and Richard Hofstadter: The American Political Tradi-
tion (New York, 1948), chapter ui.

59

Chapter i: The Agrarian Myth and Commercial Realities

face of much exploitation and under unfavorable market and
price conditions. It arose as a part of a transitional stage in the
history of American agriculture, in which the commercial farmer
was beginning to cast off habits of thought and action created
almost as much by the persistence of the agrarian myth as by
the realities of his position. He had long since taken from busi-
ness society its acquisitive goals and its speculative temper, but
he was still practicing the competitive individualism that the
most advanced sectors of industry and finance had outgrown.
He had not yet learned much from business about its marketing
devices, strategies of combination, or skills of self-defense and
self-advancement through pressure politics. His dual identity
itself was not yet resolved. He entered the twentieth century
still affected by his yeoman inheritance but with a growing
awareness of the businesslike character of his future.

((( 60 )))

CHAPTER II

THE FOLKLORE OF POPULISM

i. The Two Nations

F

IL oh a generation after the Civil War, a time of great eco-
nomic exploitation and waste, grave social corruption and ugli-
ness, the dominant note in American political life was com-
placency. Although dissenting minorities were always present,
they were submerged by the overwhelming realities of indus-
trial growth and continental settlement. The agitation of the
Populists, which brought back to American public life a ca-
pacity for effective political indignation, marks the beginning of
the end of this epoch. In the short run the Populists did not get
what they wanted, but they released the flow of protest and
criticism that swept through American political affairs from the
189G’s to the beginning of the first World War.

Where contemporary intellectuals gave the Populists a per-
functory and disdainful hearing, later historians have freely rec-
ognized their achievements and frequently overlooked their
limitations. Modem liberals, finding the Populists’ grievances
valid, their programs suggestive, their motives creditable, have
usually spoken of the Populist episode in the spirit of Vachel
Lindsay’s bombastic rhetoric;

Prairie avenger , mountain lion, >

Bryan , Bryan , Bryan , Bryan ,

Gigantic troubadour , speaking like a siege gun ,

Smashing Plymouth Bock with his boulders from the West .

61

Chapter h: The Folklore of Populism

There is indeed much that is good and usable in our Populist
past. While the Populist tradition had defects that have been too
much neglected, it does not follow that the virtues claimed for
it are all fictitious. Populism was the first modern political move-
ment of practical importance in the United States to insist that
the federal government has some responsibility for the common
weal; indeed, it was the first such movement to attack seriously
the problems created by industrialism. The complaints and de-
mands and prophetic denunciations of the Populists stirred the
latent liberalism in many Americans and startled many conserv-
atives into a new flexibility. Most of the "radical” reforms in the
Populist program proved in later years to be either harmless or
useful. In at least one important area of American life a few
Populist leaders in the South attempted something profoundly
radical and humane — to build a popular movement that would
cut across the old barriers of race — until persistent use of the
Negro bogy distracted their following. To discuss the broad
ideology of the Populists does them some injustice, for it was in
their concrete programs that they added most constructively to
our political life, and in their more general picture of the world
that they were most credulous and vulnerable. Moreover, any
account of the fallibility of Populist thinking that does not ac-
knowledge the stress and suffering out of which that thinking
emerged will be seriously remiss. But anyone who enlarges our
portrait of the Populist tradition is likely to bring out some un-
seen blemishes. In the books that have been written about the
Populist movement, only passing mention has been made of its
significant provincialism; little has been said of its relations with
nativism and nationalism; nothing has been said of its tincture
of anti-Semitism.

The Populist impulse expressed itself in a set of notions that
represent what I have called the "soft” side of agrarianism.
These notions, which appeared with regularity in the political
literature, must be examined if we are to re-create for ourselves
the Populist spirit. To extract them from the full context of the

62

THE AGE OF REFORM

polemical writings in which they appeared is undoubtedly to
oversimplify them; even to name them in any language that
comes readily to the histoiian of ideas is peihaps to suggest that
they had a formality and coherence that in reality they clearly
lacked. But since it is less feasible to have no labels than to have
somewhat too facile ones, we may enumerate the dominant
themes in Populist ideology as these: the idea of a golden age;
the concept of natural harmonies, the dualistic version of social
struggles; the conspiracy theory of history; and the doctrine of
the primacy of money. The last of these I will touch upon in
connection with the free-silver issue. Here I propose to analyze
the others, and to show how they were nurtured by the tradi-
tions of the agrarian myth.

The utopia of the Populists was in the past, not the future.
According to the agrarian myth, the health of the state was pro-
portionate to the degree to which it was dominated by the ag-
ricultural class, and this assumption pointed to the superiority
of an earlier age. The Populists looked backward with longing
to the lost agrarian Eden, to the republican America of the early
years of the nineteenth century in which there were few mil-
lionaires and, as they saw it, no beggars, when the laborer had
excellent prospects and the farmer had abundance, when states-
men still responded to the mood of the people and there was no
such thing as the money power . 1 What they meant — though
they did not express themselves in such terms — was that they
would like to restore the conditions prevailing before the de-
velopment of industrialism and the commercialization of agri-
culture. It should not be surprising that they inherited the tradi-

1 Thomas E, Watson: The Life and Tiroes of Andrew Jackson (Thom-
son, Ga., 1912), p. 325: "All the histories and all the statesmen agree that
during the first half-century of our national existence, we had no poor. A
pauper class was unthought of : a beggar, or a tramp never seen.” Cf . Mrs.
S. E. V. Emery: Seven Financial Conspiracies which have Enslaved the
American Feople (Lansing, ed. 1896), pp. 10-11.

Chapter n: The Folklore of Populism

63

tions of Jacksonian democracy, that they revived the old Jack-
sonian cry: "Equal Rights for All, Special Privileges for None,”
or that most of the slogans of 1896 echoed the battle cries of
1836. 2 General James B. Weaver, the Populist candidate for the
presidency in 1892, was an old Democrat and Free-Soiler, bom
during the days of Jackson s battle with the United States Bank,
who drifted into the Greenback movement after a short spell
as a Republican, and from there to Populism. His book, A Call
to Action , published in 1892, drew up an indictment of the busi-
ness corporation which reads like a Jacksonian polemic. Even
in those hopeful early days of the People’s Party, Weaver pro-
jected no grandiose plans for the future, but lamented the
course of recent history, the growth of economic oppression, and
the emergence of great contrasts of wealth and poverty, and
called upon his readers to do "All in [their] power to arrest the
alarming tendencies of our times.” 3

Nature, as the agrarian tradition had it, was beneficent. The
United States was abundantly endowed with rich land and rich
resources, and die "natural” consequence of such an endowment
should be the prosperity of the people. If the people failed to
enjoy prosperity, it must be because of a harsh and arbitrary
intrusion of human greed and error. "Hard times, then,” said
one popular writer, "as well as the bankruptcies, enforced idle-
ness, starvation, and the crime, misery, and moral degradation
growing out of conditions like the present, being unnatural, not
in accordance with, or the result of any natural law, must be at-
tributed to that kind of unwise and pernicious legislation which
history proves to have produced similar results in all ages of the
world. It is the mission of the age to correct these errors in
human legislation, to adopt and establish policies and systems,
in accord with, rather than in opposition to divine law.” 4

2 Note for instance the affectionate treatment of Jacksonian ideas m
Watson, op. cit , pp. 343-4.

3 James B Weaver. A Call to Action (Des Moines, 1892), pp. 377-8.

4 B. S. Heath: Labor and Finance Revolution (Chicago, 1892), p. 5.

64

THE AGE OF REFORM

In assuming a lush natural order whose workings were being
deranged by human laws. Populist writers were again drawing
on the Jacksonian tradition, whose spokesmen also had pleaded
for a proper obedience to “natural” laws as a prerequisite of
social justice . 5

Somewhat akin to the notion of the beneficence of nature was
the idea of a natural harmony of interests among the productive
classes. To the Populist mind there was no fundamental con-
flict between the farmer and the worker, between the toiling
people and the small businessman. While there might be cor-
rupt individuals in any group, the underlying interests of the
productive majority were the same; predatory behavior existed
only because it was initiated and underwritten by a small para-
sitic minority in the highest places of power. As opposed to the
idea that society consists of a number of different and frequently
clashing interests — the social pluralism expressed, for instance,
by Madison in the Federalist — the Populists adhered, less for-
mally to be sure, but quite persistently, to a kind of social dual-
ism: although they knew perfectly well that society was com-
posed of a number of classes, for all practical purposes only
one simple division need be considered. There were two na-
tions. “It is a struggle” said Sockless Jerry Simpson, “between
the robbers and tire robbed.” 6 “There are but two sides in the
conflict that is being waged in this country today,” declared a
Popuhst manifesto. “On tire one side are the allied hosts of
monopolies, the money power, great trusts and railroad corpora-
tions, who seek the enactment of laws to benefit them and im-
poverish the people. On the other are the farmers, laborers,
merchants, and all other people who produce wealth and bear
the burdens of taxation. . . . Between these two there is no

5 For this strain in Jacksonian thought, see Richard Hofstadter: “Wil-
liam Leggett, Spokesman of Jacksonian Democracy,” Political Science
Quarterly , Vol. XL VIII (December 1943), pp. 581-94, and The American
Political Tradition , pp. 60-1.

6 Elizabeth N. Barr. “The Popuhst Uprising,” in William E. Connefley,
ed.: A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans , Vol. II, p. 1170.

63

Chapter ii: The Folklore of Populism

middle ground.” 7 “On the one side,” said Bryan in his famous
speech against the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act,
“stand the corporate interests of the United States, the moneyed
interests, aggregated wealth and capital, imperious, arrogant,
compassionless. . . . On the other side stand an unnumbered
throng, those who gave to the Democratic party a name and for
whom it has assumed to speak.” 8 The people versus the inter-
ests, the public versus the plutocrats, the toiling multitude ver-
sus the money power — in various phrases this central antagon-
ism was expressed. From this simple social classification it
seemed to follow that once the techniques of misleading the
people were exposed, victory over the money power ought to
be easily accomphshed, for in sheer numbers the people were
overwhelming. “There is no power on earth that can defeat us,”
said General Weaver during the optimistic days of the campaign
of 1892. “It is a fight between labor and capital, and labor is in
the vast majority.” 9

The problems that faced the Populists assumed a delusive
simplicity: the victory over injustice, the solution for all social
ills, was concentrated in the crusade against a single, relatively
small but immensely strong interest, the money power. “With
the destruction of the money power,” said Senator Peffer, “the
death knell of gambling in grain and other commodities will be
sounded; for the business of the worst men on earth will have
been broken up, and the mainstay of the gamblers removed.
It will be an easy matter, after the greater spoilsmen have been

7 Ray Allen Billington: Westward Expansion ( New York, 1949), p. 741.

8 Allan Nevins: Grover Cleveland (New York, 1933), p. 540; Heath, op.
cit., p. 27. “The world has always contained two classes of people, one that
lived by honest labor and the other that lived off of honest labor.” Cf.
Governor Lewellmg of Kansas: “Two great forces are forming m battle
line: the same under different form and guise that have long been in
deadly antagonism, represented m master and slave, lord and vassal, king
and peasant, despot and serf, landlord and tenant, lender and borrower,
organized avarice and the necessities of the divided and helpless poor.”
James A. Barnes. John G Carlisle (New York, 1931), pp 254-5.

9 George H. Knoles. The Presidential Campaign and Election of 1892
(Stanford, 1942), p. 179.

66

THE AGE OF REFORM

shorn of their power, to clip the wings of the little ones. Once
get rid of the men who hold the country by the throat, the para-
sites can be easily removed.” 1 Since the old political parties
were the primary means by which the people were kept wander-
ing in the wilderness, the People’s Party advocates insisted, only
a new and independent political party could do this essential
job. 2 As the silver question became more prominent and the
idea of a third party faded, the need for a monolithic solution
became transmuted into another form: there was only one issue
upon which the money power could really be beaten and this
was the money issue. "When we have restored the money of the
Constitution,” said Bryan in his Cross of Gold speech, "all other
necessary reforms will be possible; but . . . until this is done
there is no other reform that can be accomplished.”

While the conditions of victory were thus made to appear
simple, they did not always appear easy, and it would be mis-
leading to imply that the tone of Populistic thinking was uni-
formly optimistic. Often, indeed, a deep-lying vein of anxiety
showed through. The very sharpness of the struggle, as the
Populists experienced it, the alleged absence of compromise so-
lutions and of intermediate groups in the body politic, the bru-
tality and desperation that were imputed to the plutocracy — all
these suggested that failure of the people to win the final con-
test peacefully could result only in a total victory for the pluto-
crats and total extinction of democratic institutions, possibly
after a period of bloodshed and anarchy. "We are nearing a
serious crisis,” declared Weaver. "If the present strained rela-
tions between wealth owners and wealth producers continue
much longer they will ripen into frightful disaster. This univer-
sal discontent must be quickly interpreted and its causes re-
moved.” 3 "We meet,” said the Populist platform of 1892, "in the
midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and

1 William A. PefFer: The Farmers Side (New York, 1891), p. 273.

2 Ibid., pp. 148-50.

8 Weaver, op. cit., p. 5.

67

Chapter n: The Folklore of Populism

material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legisla-
tures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench.
The people are demoralized. . . . The newspapers are largely
subsidized or muzzled, public opinion silenced, business pros-
trated, homes covered with mortgages, labor impoverished, and
the land concentrating in the hands of the capitalists. The urban
workmen are denied the right to organize for self-protection,
imported pauperized labor beats down their wages, a hireling
standing army, unrecognized by our laws, is established to
shoot them down, and they are rapidly degenerating into Euro-
pean conditions. The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly
stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in
the history of mankind; and the possessors of these, in turn, de-
spise the Republic and endanger liberty.” Such conditions fore-
boded "the destruction of civilization, or the establishment of
an absolute despotism.”

The common fear of*an impending apocalypse had its most
striking articulation in Ignatius Donnelly’s fantastic novel
Caesars Column. This book, published under a pseudonym, was
a piece of visionary writing, possibly inspired by the success a
few years earlier of Bellamy’s utopian romance Looking Back-
ward , which called forth a spate of imitators during the last
decade of the century . 4 5 Praised by leading members of the
Populist movement and by persons as diverse as Cardinal Gib-
bons, George Cary Eggleston, Frances E. Willard, and Julian
Hawthorne , 6 Caesars Column became one of the most widely
read books of the early nineties. Donnelly’s was different from
the other utopias. Although in its antielimactic conclusion it did
describe a utopia in a remote spot of Africa, the main story por-
trayed a sadistic anti-utopia arrived at, as it were, by standing
Bellamy on his head. The idea seems to have occurred to Don-
nelly in a moment of great discouragement at the close of the

4 See Allyn B. Forbes; “The Literary Quest for Utopia,” Social Forces ,
Vol. VI (1927), pp. 178-9.

5 E. W. Fish: Donnelliana (Chicago, 1892), pp. 121-2.

68

THE AGE OF REFORM

unusually corrupt Minnesota legislative session of 1889, 6 when
he was struck with the thought of what might come to be if the
worst tendencies of current society were projected a century
into the future. The story takes place in the year 1988, missing
by four years the date of the more recent anti-utopia of George
Orwell, with which it invites comparison, though not on literary
grounds.

Donnelly's hero and narrator is a stranger, a shepherd of
Swiss extraction living in the state of Uganda, Africa, who visits
New York and reports his adventures in a series of letters. New
York is a center of technological marvels much like Bellamy's.
The stranger approaches it in an airship, finds it fit so brightly
that its life goes on both night and day. Its streets are covered
with roofs of glass; underneath them is the city's subway sys-
tem, with smokeless and noiseless electric trains to which pas-
sengers are lowered by electric elevators. Its air-conditioned
hotels are capped by roof-top restaurants serving incredible
luxuries, where “star-eyed maidens . . . wander half seen amid
the foliage, like the houris in the Mohammedan s heaven.” 7

This sybaritic life is supported at the cost of great mass suffer-
ing, and conceals a fierce social struggle. The world of 1988 is
governed by an inner council of plutocratic leaders who stop at
nothing to crush potential opposition. They keep in their hire a
fleet of “Demons,” operators of dirigibles carrying poison-gas
bombs, whose aid they are ready to use at any sign of popular
opposition. The people themselves have become equally ruthless
— “brutality above had produced brutality below.” The farmers
are “no longer the honest yeomanry who had filled, in the old
time, the armies of Washington, and Jackson, and Grant, and
Sherman , . . but their brutalized descendants — fierce serfs —
cruel and bloodthirsty peasants.” 8 The brunt of the social strug-

6 Ibid., pp. 119-20.

7 Caesars Column (Chicago, 1891), p. 327.

8 Ibid.

69

Chapter ii: The Folklore of Populism

gle, however, is borne by the urban laborers, a polyglot, silent
mass of sullen, underfed humanity. The traveler from Uganda
learns in a conversation (documented by Donnelly with real
articles from current magazines) that as early as 1889 many
writers had warned against the potentialities of this state of af-
fairs. It was not an inevitable development, but greed and
stupidity had kept the ruling classes from heeding such prophets
of disaster. Rapacious business methods, the bribery of voters,
the exploitation of workers and farmers by the plutocracy, had
gone unchecked until the end of the nineteenth century, when
the proletariat had rebelled. The rebellion had been put down
by the farmers, not yet completely expelled by mortgage fore-
closures from their position as property-owners and business-
men. Now that the farmers too are destroyed as a prop of the
existing order, the rulers rely solely upon the bomb, the dirigi-
ble, and a mercenary army.

The convolutions of Donnelly’s plot, which includes two taste-
less love stories, do little more than entitle the book to be called
a novel, and the work is full of a kind of suppressed lascivious-
ness that one finds often in popular writing of the period. At
the climax of the story, the secret revolutionary organization,
the Brotherhood of Destruction, after buying off the “Demons,”
revolts and begins an incredible round of looting and massacre
which may have been modeled on the French Revolutionary
Terror but makes it seem pale and bloodless in comparison.
Some members of the governing class are forced to build a
pyre on which they are then burned. There is so much carnage
that the disposal of the bodies becomes an immense sanitary
problem. Caesar, one of the three leaders (who is himself be-
headed in the end ) , commands that the corpses be piled up and
covered with cement to form a gigantic pyramidal column as a
monument to the uprising. The city is finally burned, but a sav-
ing remnant of decent folk escapes in a dirigible to the African
mountains, where under the guidance of an elite of intellectuals

70

THE AGE OF REFORM

they form a Christian socialist state in which the Populist pro-
gram for land, transportation, and finance becomes a reality and
interest is illegal.

Doubtless this fantasy was meant to say what would happen
if the warnings of the reformers and the discontents of the peo-
ple went unheard and unalleviated. Far more ominous, how-
ever, than any of the vivid and hideous predictions of the book
is the sadistic and nihilistic spirit in which it was written. It is
perhaps a childish book, but in the middle of the twentieth cen-
tury it seems any tiling but laughable: it affords a frightening
glimpse into the ugly potential of frustrated popular revolt.
When Caesars Column appeared, the reform movement in
America had not yet made a dent upon the torments and op-
pressions that were felt by a large portion of the people. In some
men the situation fostered a feeling of desperation, and Don-
nelly’s was a desperate work. It came at a moment when the
threat of a social apocalypse seemed to many people not at all
remote, and it remains even now a nettlesome if distinctly minor
prophetic book.

n. History as Conspiracy

Both sides of Donnelly’s struggle, the Council of governing
plutocrats and the Brotherhood of Destruction, are significantly
portrayed as secret organizations — this despite tire fact that the
Brotherhood has millions of members. There was something
about the Populist imagination that loved the secret plot and
the conspiratorial meeting. There was in fact a widespread
Populist idea that all American history since the Civil War
could be understood as a sustained conspiracy of the interna-
tional money power.

The pervasiveness of this way of looking at things may be at-
tributed to the common feeling that farmers and workers were
not simply oppressed but oppressed deliberately, consciously,

71

Chapter h; The Folklore of Populism

continuously, and with wanton malice by "the interests / 5 It
would of course be misleading to imply that the Populists stand
alone in thinking of the events of their time as the results of a
conspiracy. This kind of thinking frequently occurs when politi-
cal and social antagonisms are sharp. Certain audiences are
especially susceptible to it — particularly, I believe, those who
have attained only a low level of education, whose access to in-
formation is poor , 9 and who are so completely shut out from ac-
cess to the centers of power that they feel themselves completely
deprived of self-defense and subjected to unlimited manipula-
tion by those who wield power. There are, moreover, certain
types of popular movements of dissent that offer special oppor-
tunities to agitators with paranoid tendencies, who are able to
make a vocational asset out of their psychic disturbances . 1 Such
persons have an opportunity to impose their own style of thought
upon the movements they lead. It would of course be mislead-
ing to imply that there are no such things as conspiracies in
history. Anything that partakes of political strategy may need,
for a time at least, an element of secrecy, and is thus vulnerable
to being dubbed conspiratorial. Corruption itself has the char-
acter of conspiracy. In this sense the Credit Mobilier was a con-
spiracy, as was the Teapot Dome affair. If we tend to be too
condescending to the Populists at this point, it may be necessary
to remind ourselves that they had seen so much bribery and cor-
ruption, particularly on the part of the railroads, that they had
before them a convincing model of the management of affairs
through conspiratorial behavior. Indeed, what makes conspiracy
theories so widely acceptable is that they usually contain a germ
of truth. But there is a great difference between locating con-
spiracies in history and saying that history is, in effect, a con-

9 In this respect it is worth pointing out that in later years, when facili-
ties for realistic exposure became more adequate, popular attacks on “the
money power” showed fewer elements of fantasy and more of reality.

1 See, for instance, the remarks about a mysterious series of interna-
tional assassinations with which Mary E. Lease opens her book The
Problem of Civilization Solved (Chicago, 1895).

72

THE AGE OF REFORM

spiracy, between singling out those conspiratorial acts that do
on occasion occur and weaving a vast fabric of social explana-
tion out of nothing but skeins of evil plots.

When conspiracies do not exist it is necessary for those who
think in this fashion to invent them. Among the most celebrated
instances in modern history are the forgery of the Protocols of
the Elders of Zion and the grandiose fabrication under Stalin s
regime of the Trotzkyite-Bukharinite-Zinovievite center. These
inventions were cynical. In the history of American political
controversy there is a tradition of conspiratorial accusations
which seem to have been sincerely believed. Jefferson appears
really to have believed, at one time, that the Federalists were
conspiring to re-establish monarchy. Some Federalists believed
that the Jeffersonians were conspiring to subvert Christianity.
The movement to annex Texas and the war with Mexico were
alleged by many Northerners to be a slaveholders' conspiracy.
The early Republican leaders, including Lincoln, charged that
there was a conspiracy on the part of Stephen A. Douglas to
make slavery a nationwide institution. Such pre-Civil War par-
ties as the Know-Nothing and Anti-Masonic movements were
based almost entirely upon conspiratorial ideology. The Nye
Committee, years ago, tried to prove that our entry into the first
World War was the work of a conspiracy of bankers and muni-
tions-makers. And now not only our entry into the second World
War, but the entire history of the past twenty years or so is be-
ing given the color of conspiracy by the cranks and political
fakirs of our own age . 2

2 One by-product of this conspiratorial mania is the myth that the
recognition of Russia m 1933 was the result of a plot by the New Dealers.
Paul Boiler, Jr, in a highly amusing article, “The ‘Great Conspiracy’ of
1933* a Study m Short Memories/’ Southwest Review , Vol XXXIX
(Spnng, 1954), pp 97-112, shows that some of the same persons who
have indulged m the conspiracy cry were advocates of recognition before
1933.

In reading the excellent study by Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guter-
man: Prophets of Deceit (New York, 1949), a study of recent authoritarian
agitators, I am impressed by certain similarities m the style of thought dis-

73

Chapter n: The Folklore of Populism

Nevertheless, when these qualifications have been taken into
account, it remains true that Populist thought showed an un-
usually strong tendency to account for relatively impersonal
events in highly personal terms. An overwhelming sense of
grievance does not find satisfactory expression in impersonal
explanations, except among those with a well-developed tradi-
tion of intellectualism. It is the city, after all, that is the home of
intellectual complexity. The farmer lived in isolation from the
great world in which his fate was actually decided. He was ac-
cused of being unusually suspicious , 3 and certainly his situation,
trying as it was, made thinking in impersonal terms difficult.
Perhaps the rural middle-class leaders of Populism (this was a
movement of farmers, but it was not led by farmers ) had more
to do than the farmer himself with the cast of Populist think-
ing. At any rate. Populist thought often carries one into a world
in which the simple virtues and unmitigated villainies of a rural
melodrama have been projected on a national and even an in-
ternational scale. In Populist thought the farmer is not a
speculating businessman, victimized by the risk economy of
which he is a part, but rather a wounded yeoman, preyed upon
by those who are alien to the life of folkish virtue. A villain was

played by their subjects and that of a certain type of Populist writer repre-
sented by Mrs. Emery, “Com” Harvey, Donnelly, and Mrs Lease. There
seem to be certain persistent themes m popular agitation of this sort that
transcend particular historical eras. Among the themes delmeated by Low-
enthal and Guterman that one finds in Populist literature as well as among
their agitators are the following: the conception of history as conspiracy;
an obsessive concern with the fabulous enjoyments deemed to be the lot
of the plutocrats; cynicism about the two-party system; the notion that the
world is moving toward an immense apocalypse; the exclusive attention to
the greed and other personal vices of bankers and other selected plutocrats,
as opposed to a structural analysis of the social system; anti-Semitism and
xenophobia; the appeal to the native simplicity and virtue of the folk.
There are, of course, other themes singled out by Lowenthal and Guter-
man that seem more peculiar to the conditions of our own time and lack
cognates in the literature of Populism.

3 Frederick L. Paxson: “The Agricultural Surplus: a Problem in His-
tory,” Agricultural History , Vol. VI (April 1932), p 58; cf. the observa-
tions of Lord Bryce m The American Commonwealth (New York, ed.
1897), Vol. II, pp. 294-5.

74

THE AGE OF REFORM

needed, marked with the unmistakable stigmata of the villains
of melodrama, and the more remote he was from the familiar
scene, the more plausibly his villainies could be exaggerated.

It was not enough to say that a conspiracy of the money
power against the common people was going on. It had been
going on ever since the Civil War. It was not enough to say that
it stemmed from Wall Street. It was international: it stemmed
from Lombard Street. In his preamble to the People’s Party
platform of 1892, a succinct, official expression of Populist views,
Ignatius Donnelly asserted: “A vast conspiracy against man-
kind has been organized on two continents, and it is rapidly
taking possession of the world. If not met and overthrown at
once it forebodes terrible social convulsions, the destruction of
civilization, or the establishment of an absolute despotism.” A
manifesto of 1895, signed by fifteen outstanding leaders of the
People’s Party, declared: “As early as 1865-66 a conspiracy was
entered into between the gold gamblers of Europe and America.

. . . For nearly thirty years these conspirators have kept the
people quarreling over less important matters while they have
pursued with unrelenting zeal their one central purpose. . . .
Every device of treachery, every resource of statecraft, and
every artifice known to the secret cabals of the international
gold ring are being made use of to deal a blow to the prosperity
of the people and the financial and commercial independence
of the country.” 4

The financial argument behind the conspiracy theory was sim-
ple enough. Those who owned bonds wanted to be paid not in
a common currency but in gold, which was at a premium; those
who lived by lending money wanted as high a premium as pos-
sible to be put on their commodity by increasing its scarcity.
The panics, depressions, and bankruptcies caused by their
policies only added to their wealth; such catastrophes offered
opportunities to engross the wealth of others through business

4 Frank L. McVey: The Populist Movement (New York, 1896),

pp. 201-2.

75

Chapter h: The Folklore of Populism

consolidations and foreclosures. Hence the interests actually
relished and encouraged hard times. The ' Greenbackers had
long since popularized this argument, insisting that an adequate
legal-tender currency would break the monopoly of the “Shy-
locks ” Their demand for $50 of circulating medium per capita,
still in the air when the People's Party arose, was rapidly re-
placed by the less “radical” demand for free coinage of silver.
But what both the Greenbackers and free-silverites held in com-
mon was the idea that the contraction of currency was a deliber-
ate squeeze, the result of a long-range plot of the “Anglo-Ameri-
can Gold Trust.” Wherever one turns in the Populist literature of
the nineties one can find this conspiracy theory expressed. It is
in the Populist newspapers, the proceedings of the silver conven-
tions, the immense pamphlet literature broadcast by the Ameri-
can Bimetallic League, the Congressional debates over money;
it is elaborated in such popular books as Mrs. S. E. V. Emery's
Seven Financial Conspiracies which have Enslaved the Ameri-
can People or Gordon Clark's Shyloch as Banker , Bondholder,
Corruptionist , Conspirator .

Mrs. Emery’s book, first published in 1887, and dedicated to
“the enslaved people of a dying republic,” achieved great cir-
culation, especially among the Kansas Populists. According to
Mrs. Emery, the United States had been an economic Garden of
Eden in the period before the Civil War. The fall of man had
dated from the war itself, when “the money kings of Wall Street”
determined that they could take advantage of the wartime ne-
cessities of their fellow men by manipulating the currency. “Con-
trolling it, they could inflate or depress the business of the
country at pleasure, they could send the warm life current
through the channels of trade, dispensing peace, happiness, and
prosperity, or they could check its flow, and completely paralyze
the industries of the country.” 6 With this great power for good
in their hands, the Wall Street men preferred to do evil. Lin-
coln’s war policy of issuing greenbacks presented them with

6 Emery, op. cit, p. 13.

76

THE AGE OF REFORM

the dire threat of an adequate supply of currency. So the Shy-
locks gathered in convention and "perfected” a conspiracy to
create a demand for their gold. 6 The remainder of the book was
a recital of a series of seven measures passed between 1862 and
1875 which were alleged to be a part of this continuing con-
spiracy, the total effect of which was to contract the currency
of the country further and further until finally it squeezed the
industry of the country like a hoop of steel. 7

Mrs. Emery’s rhetoric left no doubt of the sustained purpose-
fulness of this scheme — described as "villainous robbery,” and
as having been "secured through the most soulless strategy.” 8
She was most explicit about the so-called "crime of 1873,” the
demonetization of silver, giving a fairly full statement of the
standard greenback-silverite myth concerning that event. As
they had it, an agent of the Bank of England, Ernest Seyd by
name, had come to the United States in 1872 with $500,000 with
which he had bought enough support in Congress to secure the
passage of the demonetization measure. This measure was sup-
posed to have greatly increased the value of American four per
cent bonds held by British capitalists by making it necessary to
pay them in gold only. To it Mrs. Emery attributed the panic of
1873, its bankruptcies, and its train of human disasters: "Mur-
der, insanity, suicide, divorce, drunkenness and all forms of im-
morality and crime have increased from that day to this in the
most appalling ratio.” 9

"Coin” Harvey, the author of the most popular single docu-
ment of the whole currency controversy, Coins Financial

6 Ibid , pp. 14-18.

7 The measures were: the “exception clause” of 1862, the National Bank
Act of 1863, the retirement of the greenbacks, beginning m 1866; the
“credit-strengthening act” of March 18, 1869; the refunding of the national
debt in 1870, the demonetization of silver m 1873; and the destruction of
fractional paper currency m 1875.

s Ibid , pp. 25, 43.

9 Ibid., pp. 54-5. For a more elaborate statement of this story see
Gordon Clark: Shylock: as Banker , Bondholder , Corruptionist , Conspirator
(Washington, 1894), pp. 88-99.

77

Chapter h: The Folklore of Populism

School , also published a novel, A Tale of Two Nations , in which
the conspiracy theory of history was incorporated into a melo-
dramatic tale. In this story the powerful English banker Baron
Rothe plans to bring about the demonetization of silver in the
United States, in part for his own aggrandizement but also to
prevent the power of the United States from outstripping that
of England. He persuades an American Senator (probably John
Sherman, the bSte noire of the silverites ) to co-operate in using
British gold in a campaign against silver. To be sure that the
work is successful, he also sends to the United States a relative
and ally, one Rogasner, who stalks through the story like the
villains in the plays of Dion Boucicault, muttering to himself
such remarks as “I am here to destroy the United States — Corn-
wallis could not have done more. For the wrongs and insults, for
the glory of my own country, I will bury the knife deep into
the heart of this nation/ 51 Against the plausibly drawn back-
ground of the corruption of the Grant administration, Rogasner
proceeds to buy up the American Congress and suborn Ameri-
can professors of economics to testify for gold. He also falls in
love with a proud American beauty, but his designs on her are
foiled because she loves a handsome young silver Congressman
from Nebraska who bears a striking resemblance to William
Jennings Bryan!

One feature of the Populist conspiracy theory that has been
generally overlooked is its frequent link with a kind of rhetorical
anti-Semitism. The slight current of anti-Semitism that existed
in the United States before the 1890 5 s had been associated with
problems of money and credit. 1 2 During the closing years of the

1 W. H. Harvey: A Tale of Two Nations (Chicago, 1894), p. 69.

2 Anti-Semitism as a kind of rhetorical flourish seems to have had a long
underground history m the United States. During the pamc of 1837, when
many states defaulted on their obligations, many of which were held by
foreigners, we find Governor McNutt of Mississippi defending the practice
by baiting Baron Rothschild: “The blood of Judas and Shylock flows m his
veins, and he unites the qualities of both his countrymen . . Quoted
by George W. Edwards: The Evolution of Finance Capitalism (New York,
1938), p. 149. Similarly we find Thaddeus Stevens assailing “the Roths-

78

THE AGE OF REFORM

century it grew noticeably. 8 While the jocose and rather heavy-
handed anti-Semitism that can be found in Henry Adams’s let-
ters of the 1890’s shows that this prejudice existed outside
Populist literature, it was chiefly Populist writers who expressed
that identification of the Jew with the usurer and the “interna-
tional gold ring” which was the central theme of the American
anti-Semitism of the age. The omnipresent symbol of Shylock
can hardly be taken in itself as evidence of anti-Semitism, but
the frequent references to the House of Rothschild make it clear
that for many sflverites the Jew was an organic part of the con-
spiracy theory of history. Coin Harveys Baron Rothe was
clearly meant to be Rothschild; his Rogasner (Ernest Seyd?)
was a dark figure out of the coarsest anti-Semitic tradition. “You
are very wise in your way,” Rogasner is told at the climax of the
tale, “the commercial way, inbred through generations. The
politic, scheming, devious way, inbred through generations
also.” 4 One of the cartoons in the effectively illustrated Coin’s
Financial School showed a map of the world dominated by the
tentacles of an octopus at the site of the British Isles, labeled:
“Rothschilds.” 5 In Populist demonology, anti-Semitism and An-
glophobia went hand in hand.

The note of anti-Semitism was often sounded openly in the
campaign for silver. A representative of the New Jersey Grange,
for instance, did not hesitate to warn the members of the Second
National Silver Convention of 1892 to watch out for political
candidates who represented “Wall Street, and the Jews of Eu-

childs, Goldsmiths, and other large money dealers” during his early ap-
peals for "greenbacks. See James A. Woodbum: The Life of Thaddeus
Stevens (Indianapolis, 1913), pp. 576, 579.

3 See Oscar Handhn: “American Views of the Jew at the Opening of the
Twentieth Century, Publications of the American Jewish Historical So-
ciety, no. 40 (June 1951), pp. 323-44.

4 Harvey: A Tale of Two Nations, p. 289; cf. also p 265: “Did not our
ancestors . . . take whatever women of whatever race most pleased their
fancy?’

5 Harvey: Coin’s Financial School (Chicago, 1894), p. 124; for a nota-
ble polemic against the Jews, see James B. Goode. The Modern Banker
(Chicago, 1896), chapter xn.

79

Chapter h: The Folklore of Populism

rope/’ 6 Mary E. Lease described Grover Cleveland as "the
agent of Jewish bankers and British gold.” 7 Donnelly repre-
sented the leader of the governing Council of plutocrats in
Caesars Column , one Prince Cabano, as a powerful Jew, born
Jacob Isaacs; one of the triumvirate who lead the Brotherhood
of Destruction is also an exiled Russian Jew, who flees from the
apocalyptic carnage with a hundred million dollars which he
intends to use to "revive the ancient splendors of the Jewish
race, in the midst of the ruins of the world.” 8 One of the more
elaborate documents of the conspiracy school traced the power
of the Rothschilds over America to a transaction between Hugh
McCulloch, Secretary of the Treasury under Lincoln and John-
son, and Baron James Rothschild. "The most direful part of this
business between Rothschild and the United States Treasury
was not the loss of money, even by hundreds of millions. It was
the resignation of the country itself into the hands of England,
as England had long been resigned into the hands of her Jews.” 9
Such rhetoric, which became common currency in the move-
ment, later passed beyond Populism into the larger stream of
political protest. By the time the campaign of 1896 arrived, an

6 Proceedings of the Second National Silver Convention (Washington,
1892), p. 48.

7 Mary E. Lease: The Problem of Civilization Solved , pp. 319-20, cf.
p. 291.

8 Donnelly, op. cit., pp. 147, 172, 331.

9 Gordon Clark, op cit., pp. 59-60; for the linkage between anti-
Semitism and the conspiracy theme, see pp. 2, 4, 8, 39, 55-8, 102-3, 112-
13, 117. There was a somewhat self-conscious and apologetic note in popu-
listic anti-Semitism. Remarking that “the aristocracy of the world is now
almost altogether of Hebrew origin,” one of Donnelly's characters explains
that the terrible persecutions to which the Jews had been subjected for
centuries heightened the selective process among them, leaving “only the
strong of body, the cunning of brain, the long-headed, the persistent . . .
and now the Christian world is paying, m tears and blood, for the suffer-
ings inflicted by their bigoted and ignorant ancestors upon a noble race.
When the time came for liberty and fair play the Jew was master m the
contest with the Gentile, who hated and feared him.” Caesars Column ,
p. 37. In another fanciful tale Donnelly made amends to the Jews by
restormg Palestine to them and making it veiy prosperous. The Golden
Bottle (New York and St. Paul, 1892), pp. 280-1.

80

THE AGE OF REFORM

Associated Press reporter noticed as 'one of the striking things”
about the Populist convention at St. Louis "the extraordinary
hatred of the Jewish race. It is not possible to go into any hotel
in the city without hearing the most bitter denunciation of the
Jews as a class and of the particular Jews who happen to have
prospered in the world.” 1 This report may have been somewhat
overdone, but the identification of the silver cause with anti-
Semitism did become close enough for Bryan to have to pause
in the midst of his campaign to explain to the Jewish Democrats
of Chicago that in denouncing the policies of the Rothschilds he
and his silver friends were "not attacking a race; we are attack-
ing greed and avarice which know no race or religion.” 2

It would be easy to misstate the character of Populist anti-
Semitism or to exaggerate its intensity. For Populist anti-Semi-
tism was entirely verbal. It was a mode of expression, a rhetorical
style, not a tactic or a program. It did not lead to exclusion laws,
much less to riots or pogroms. There were, after all, relatively
few Jews in the United States in the late 1880’s and early 1890’s,
most of them remote from the areas of Populist strength. It is
one thing, however, to say that this prejudice did not go beyond
a certain symbolic usage, quite another to say that a people’s
choice of symbols is of no significance. Populist anti-Semitism
does have its importance — chiefly as a symptom of a certain
ominous credulity in the’Populist mind. It is not too much to say
that the Greenback-Populist tradition activated most of what
we have of modem popular anti-Semitism in the United States. 3

1 Quoted by Edward Flower: Anti-Semitism in the Free Silver and
Populist Movements and the Election of 1896 , unpublished M A. thesis,
Columbia University, 1952, p. 27; this essay is illuminating on the develop-
ment of anti-Semitism in this period and on the reaction of some of the
Jewish press

2 William Jennings Bryan: The First Battle (Chicago, 1897), p. 581.

8 1 distinguish here between popular anti-Semitism, which is hnked with

E ohtical issues, and upper-class anti-Semitism, which is a variety of snob-
ery. It is characteristic of the mdulgence which Populism has received on
this count that Carey McWilliams m his A Mask for Privilege: Anti-
Semitism in America (Boston, 1948) deals with early American anti-
Semitism simply as an upper-class phenomenon. In his historical account

81

Chapter ii: The Folklore of Populism

From Thaddeus Stevens and Coin Harvey to Father Coughlin,
and from Brooks and Henry Adams to Ezra Pound, there has
been a curiously persistent linkage between anti-Semitism and
money and credit obsessions. A full history of modem anti-
Semitism in the United States would reveal, I believe, its sub-
stantial Populist lineage, but it may be sufficient to point out
here that neither the informal connection between Bryan and
the Klan in the twenties nor Thomas E. Watson's conduct in the
Leo Frank case were altogether fortuitous. 4 And Henry Ford's
notorious anti-Semitism of the 1920's, along with his hatred of
“Wall Street,” were the foibles of a Michigan farm boy who had
been liberally exposed to Populist notions. 5

hi. The Spirit Militant

The conspiratorial theory and the associated Anglophobic and
Judophobic feelings were part of a larger complex of fear and

of the rise of anti-Semitism he does not mention the Greenback-Populist
tradition. Daniel Bell: “The Grass Roots of American Jew Hatred,” Jewish
Frontier , Vol. XI (June 1944), pp. 15-20, is one of the few writers who
has perceived that there is any relation between latter-day anti-Semites
and the earlier Popuhst tradition. See also Handlm, op. cit. Arnold Rose has
pointed out that much of American anti-Semitism is intimately hnked to
the agrarian myth and to resentment of the ascendancy of the city. The
Jew is made a symbol of both capitalism and urbanism, which are them-
selves too abstract to be satisfactory objects of animosity. Commentary ,
Vol. VI (October 1948), pp. 374-78.

4 For the latter see Woodward: Tom Watson , chapter xxiii.

5 Keith Sward: The Legend of Henry Ford (New York, 1948),
pp 83-4, 113-14, 119-20, 132, 143-60. Cf. especially pp. 145-6: “Ford
could fuse the theory of Populism and the practice of capitalism easily
enough for the reason that what he carried forward from the old platforms
of agrarian revolt, in the mam, were the planks that were most innocent
and least radical. Like many a greenbacker of an earlier day, the publisher
of the Dearborn Independent was haunted by the will-o’-the-wisp of
'money’ and the bogy of 'race/ It was these superstitions that lay at the
very marrow of his political thinking.” For further illustration of the effects
of the Popuhst tradition on a Mountain State Senator, see Oscar Handhn’s
astute remarks on Senator Pat McCarran in “The Immigration Fight Has
Only Begun,” Commentary , Vol. XIV (July 1952), pp. 3-4.

82

THE AGE OF REFORM

suspicion of the stranger that haunted, and still tragically
haunts, the nativist American mind. This feeling, though hardly
confined to Populists and Bryanites, was none the less exhibited
by them in a particularly virulent form. Everyone remote and
alien was distrusted and hated — even Americans, if they hap-
pened to be city people. The old agrarian conception of the city
as the home of moral corruption reached a new pitch. Chicago
was bad, New York, which housed the Wall Street bankers, was
farther away and worse; London was still farther away and still
worse. This traditional distrust grew stronger as the cities grew
larger, and as they were filled with immigrant aliens. As early as
1885 the Kansas preacher Josiah Strong had published Our
Country , a book widely read in the West, in which the cities
were discussed as a great problem of the future, much as though
they were some kind of monstrous malignant growths on the
body politic. 6 Hamlin Garland recalled that when he first visited
Chicago, in the late 1880’s, having never seen a town larger than
Rockford, Illinois, he naturally assumed that it swarmed with
thieves. <e If the city is miles across,” he wondered, ‘how am I to
get from the railway station to my hotel without being as-
saulted?” While such extreme fears could be quieted by some
contact with the city, others were actually confirmed — espe-
cially when the farmers were confronted with city prices. 7 Na-
tivist prejudices were equally aroused by immigration, for which
urban manufacturers, with their insatiable demand for labor,
were blamed. "We have become the world’s melting pot,” wrote
Thomas E. Watson. "The scum of creation has been dumped on
us. Some of our principal cities are more foreign than American.
The most dangerous and corrupting hordes of the Old World
have invaded us. The vice and crime which they have planted
in our midst are sickening and terrifying. What brought these

6 Josiah Strong: Our Country (New York, 1885), chapter x, for the im-

pact of the city, see Arthur M. Schlesinger: The Rise of the City (New
York, 1933). J

7 Hamlin Garland: A Son of the Middle Border (New York, ed. 1923),
pp. 269, 295.

83

Chapter ii: The Folklore of Populism

Goths and Vandals to our shores? The manufacturers are mainly
to blame. They wanted cheap labor: and they didn’t care a
curse how much harm to our future might be the consequence
of their heartless policy.” 8

Anglo-Saxons, whether Populist or patrician, found it difficult
to accept other peoples on terms of equality or trust. Others were
objects to be manipulated — benevolently, it was often said, but
none the less firmly. Mary E. Lease, that authentic voice of
inland Populism who became famous for advising farmers to
* raise less corn and more hell,” wrote a book in 1895 under the
ingratiating title: The Problem of Civilization Solved , in which
this ethnic condescension was rather ingenuously displayed. Ac-
cording to Mrs. Lease, Europe and America stood on the brink
of one of two immense catastrophes — a universal reign of an-
archistic terror or the establishment of a world-wide Russian
despotism. The only hope of averting catastrophe was, as
she put it, “the most stupendous migration of races the world
has ever known, and thereby relieve the congested centers of
the world’s population of half their inhabitants and provide Free
Homes for half of mankind.” 9 She proposed a vast reshuffling
of peoples in which the tropics in both hemispheres be taken
over by white planters with Negroes and Orientals as “tillers of
the soil.” “Through all the vicissitudes of time, the Caucasian
has arisen to the moral and intellectual supremacy of the world,
until now this favored race is fitted for the Stewardship of the
Earth and Emancipation from Manual Labor ” 1 This steward-
ship, far from being an imposition on the lesser breeds without
the law, would be an act of mercy; it would take the starved and
miserable ryots and coolies of the world and by giving them
management and supervision provide them with the means of

8 Watson: Andrew Jackson , p. 326; cf. Caesars Column , p.^ 131: “The
silly ancestors of the Americans called it ‘national development* when they
imported millions of foreigners to take up the public lands and left nothing
for their own children.”

9 Lease, op. cit., p. 17.

1 Loc. cit.

84

THE AGE OF REFORM

life, as well as rescue them from paganism. Such a change they
would "hail with joy.” 2

The proposal for colonization under government supervision
and with governmental subsidies was supplemented by a grand
plan for what Mrs. Lease candidly called the partitioning of the
world, in which the Germanic and Latin peoples would be
united into two racial confederations, and the British and Rus-
sian empires checked and neutralized by other powerful states.
The role of the United States in this world was to be the head
of the federated American republics. Canada should be annexed
— so also Cuba, Haiti, Santo Domingo, and Hawaii. The Latin
republics would be fertile fields for colonization by the surplus
population of the United States — which no longer had a public
domain to give its citizens — and the North Americans would
import "vast swarms of Asiatics as laborers for the plantations.”
Mrs. Lease felt that the Latins, like the Asiatics, would cer-
tainly benefit from this and that they ought to like it. Moreover,
they owed the United States a debt of gratitude: “We stand, and
have stood for years, ready to extend our blood and treasure in
defense of Latin America against European aggression. Can
they not reciprocate by giving us the leadership on this con-
tinent? If not, we should take it! We should follow the example
of European nations and annex all we can and establish pro-
tectorates wherever possible in America.” 3

Mrs. Lease’s book, the work of a naive but imaginative mind
driven to the pitch of its powers by an extraordinary capacity
for suspicion, was hardly as representative or popular as Coins
Financial School or Gsesafs Column , though its author was one
of the indigenous products of Populist political culture. Mrs.
Lease’s peculiar ideas of Weltpolitik , her particular views on
tropical colonization, were not common currency in Populist
thinking. But other assumptions in her book could be found
among the Populists with great frequency — the smug assump-

2 Ibid., pp. 81-2, 34, 35.

3 Ibid., pp. 177-8.

85

Chapter ii: The Folklore of Populism

tion of Anglo-Saxon superiority and benevolence, the sense of
a need for some new area of expansion, the hatred of England,
the fear of Russia , 4 the anxiety over the urban masses as a po-
tential source of anarchy.

The nationalist fervor of Mrs. Lease’s book also represents one
side of a curiously ambiguous aspect of Popuhsm. On the sur-
face there was a strong note of anti-militarism and anti-imperi-
alism in the Populist movement and Bryan democracy. Populists
were opposed to large standing armies and large naval establish-
ments, most of them supported Bryan’s resistance to the acquisi-
tion of the Philippines. They looked upon the military as a threat
to democracy, upon imperialist acquisitions as gains only to
financiers and 4 monarchists,” not to the people . 5 But what they
chiefly objected to was institutional militarism rather than war
itself, imperialism rather than jingoism. Under a patina of
pacifist rhetoric they were profoundly nationalistic and belli-
cose. What the nativist mind most resolutely opposed was not
so much war itself as co-operation with European governments
for any ends at all . 6 Those who have been puzzled in our own

4 Since this was a commonplace in the nineteenth century, it would be
too much to ascribe to Mrs. Lease any special prophetic stature.

5 See W. H Harvey: Coin on Money , Trusts , and Imperialism (Chi-
cago, 1900), for an expression of popular feehngs on these and other issues.

6 The best illustration was the American bimetallist movement. It was
only during the 1870's that the international gold standard can be said to
have come mto existence, and it did so on the eve of the long price decline
of the “Great Depression ” The desire of the silver mterests m various parts
of the world, together with those groups that sought in silver a means of
raising the general level of prices, gave rise almost from the beginning to
bimetallic movements nearly everywhere in western Europe. Even in Eng-
land, the commercial center and the creditor nation which did not relish
being paid its debts m depreciated currency, there were eminent statesmen
who favored bimetallism; and the two greatest economists of the era,
Jevons and Marshall, considered it seriously. But everywhere except in the
United States the bimetallic movements looked to international action as
the method of establishing a bimetallic standard, m the United States alone
the silver interests adhered to the possibility of unilateral action. The con-
stant expectation that the United States would act alone to maintam the
price of silver was an impediment to action elsewhere. From the 1870’s
onward conservative American statesmen who sought to initiate action that
would lead to an international bimetallic standard had been caught be-

86

THE AGE OF REFORM

time by the anti-European attitudes of men like Senator Taft
and General MacArthur, and by their alternating espousal of
dangerously aggressive and near-pacifistic (or anti-militarist)
policies, will find in the Populist mentality a suggestive prece-
dent.

The Populists distinguished between wars for humanity and
wars of conquest. The first of these they considered legitimate,
but naturally they had difficulty in discriminating between the
two, and they were quite ready to be ballyhooed into a right-
eous war, as the Cuban situation was to show. During the early
nineteenth century popular sentiment in the United States,
especially within the democratic camp, had been strong for the
republican movements in Europe and Latin America. With
the coming of the nineties and the great revulsion against the
outside world, the emphasis was somewhat changed; where
sympathy with oppressed and revolutionary peoples had been
the dominant sentiment in the past, the dominant sentiment
now seemed rather to be hatred of their governments. That
there must always be such an opposition between peoples and
governments the Populist mind did not like to question, and
even the most democratic governments of Europe were per-
sistently looked upon as though they were nothing but reaction-
ary monarchies . 7

After the success of Cxsars Column , Donnelly wrote another
fantasy called The Golden Bottle , in which this antagonism had
a vivid expression. The first part of the story need not detain us:
it deals with the life of one Ephraim Benezet of Kansas who is

tween the difficulty of lining up the other nations and the sharp impatience
of domestic silver interests, which insisted with growmg asperity as the
years went by that reluctance to go it alone was treasonable See J. B.
Condliffe* The Commerce of Nations (New York, 1950), chapter xii, “The
International Gold Standard”; Jeannette P. Nichols: “Silver Diplomacy,”
Political Science Quarterly , Vol. XXXVIH (December 1933), pp. 565-88.
On the relation between silvensm and isolationism, see Ray Allen Billing-
ton: “The Origins of Middle Western Isolationism,” Political Science Quar-
terly, Vol LX (March 1945), esp, pp. 50-2.

7 See Harvey’s Coin on Money, Trusts, and Imperialism, passim .

87

Chapter n: The Folklore of Populism

given a bottle that empowers him to turn iron into gold, a wind-
fall which not surprisingly makes it possible for him to solve his
own and the country's financial problems. Before long he is
elected President, and after foiling a plot to kill him and check-
ing a bankers' conspiracy to start a civil war, he delivers an
extraordinary inaugural message. The one thing that prevents
the American people, he tells them, from rising “to still higher
levels of greatness and happiness" is the Old World. America is
“united by a ligament to a corpse — Europe!" This begins an ap-
peal to close the gates against further wretched immigrants
from Europe who will be used by American capitalists to beat
down the wages of American workingmen. “We could, by wise
laws and just conditions, lift up the toilers of our own country to
the level of the middle classes, but a vast multitude of the
miserable of other lands clung to their skirts and dragged them
down. Our country was the safety-valve which permitted the
discontent of the Old World to escape. If that vent was closed,
every throne in Europe would be blown up in twenty years.

. . . For the people of the Old World, having to choose between
death by starvation and resistance to tyrants, would turn upon
their oppressors and tear them to pieces." There follows an ap-
peal to the peoples of Europe to revolt against their rulers. The
countries of Europe respond by declaring war, and in the
great international conflict that follows, the United States comes
to Europe as an invading liberator. President Benezet wins, of
course, and frees even the Russians simply by making them
literate. He also establishes a world government to keep the
peace. 8

It is no coincidence, then, that Populism and jingoism grew
concurrently in the United States during the 1890's. The rising

8 Ignatius Donnelly. The Golden Bottle , pp. 202 ff. ‘T would be sorry,”
said Donnelly in his preface, “if any one should be so foolish as to argue
that the triumph of the People's Party means a declaration of war against
the whole world.” What concerns us here, however, is not the Populists' in-
tentions m this sphere, which were doubtless innocent enough, but the
emotions laid bare by Donnelly's fantasy.

88

THE AGE OF REFORM

mood of intolerant nationalism was a nationwide thing, certainly
not confined to the regions of Populist strength; but among no
stratum of the population was it stronger than among the
Populists. Moreover it was on jingoist issues that the Populist
and Bryanite sections of the country, with the aid of the yellow
press and many political leaders, achieved that rapport with
the masses of the cities which they never succeeded in getting
on economic issues. Even conservative politicians sensed that,
whatever other grounds of harmony were lacking between
themselves and the populace of the hinterland, grounds for
unity could be found in war.

The first, and for the Populists the preferred, enemy would
have been England, the center of the gold power. Coins Finan-
cial School closed with a bitter philippic against England: “If
it is claimed we must adopt for our money the metal England
selects, and can have no independent choice in the matter, let
us make the test and find out if it is true. It is not American to
give up without trying. If it is true, let us attach England to the
United States and blot her name out from among the nations of
the earth. A war with England would be the most popular ever
waged on the face of the earth . . . the most just war ever
waged by man.” 9 Some leaders of the Republican Party, which
had attempted to appease the powerful silver sentiment in 1890
by passing the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, made a strategic
move in the troubled year of 1894 to capture Western sentiment.
On May 2 there opened in London an unofficial bimetallic con-
ference in which American bimetallists were represented by
Brooks Adams and Senator Wolcott of Colorado; fifteen promi-
nent Senators, including outstanding Republicans, cabled their
endorsement of international bimetallism. Senator Lodge pro-
posed in the Senate to blackmail Britain by passing a discrimi-
natory tariff against her if she did not consent to a bimetallic

Coin s Financial School , pp. 131-2,

89

Chapter h: The Folklore of Populism

plan, a scheme nicely calculated to hold in line some of the
Western silverite jingoes and Anglophobes . 1

This proposal was defeated by the Cleveland Democrats, but
the Democratic Party’s turn to make capital out of jingo senti-
ment came the next year with the excessively belligerent con-
duct of the Venezuela affair, one of the few really popular
moves of the Cleveland administration . 2 A west-coast newspaper
spoke for many Americans when it said: “We are at the mercy of
England, as far as our finances go, and [war] is our only way
out .” 3 “War would be a good thing even if we got whipped,”
declared the silver Senator from Nevada, William M. Stewart,
“for it would rid us of English bank rule ” 4 And a Congressman
from a strong Populist state wrote to congratulate Secretary of
State Olney for having spiked the guns of Populism and anarch-
ism with his vigorous diplomacy . 5 Olney was also urged by the
American consul in Havana to identify the administration and
the sound-money Democrats with a strong policy of mediation
or intervention in the war in Cuba; it would either get credit for
stopping the atrocities, for buying Cuba, if that was the out-
come, or for “fighting a successful war, if war there be. In the
latter case, the enthusiasm, the applications for service, the em-
ployment of many of the unemployed, might do much towards
directing the minds of the people from imaginary ills, the relief
of which is erroneously supposed to be reached by Tree Sil-
ver. 6

When the Venezuela matter was settled, the attention of
jingoes turned toward Cuba. The situation of the oppressed

1 Nevins, op cit., pp. 608-9.

2 On domestic pressures behind this incident, see Nelson M. Blake:
“Background of Cleveland's Venezuela Pokey,” American Historical Re-
view, Vol. XLVII (January 1942), pp. 259-77.

3 James A. Barnes: John G. Carlisle (New York, 1931), p. 410.

4 Nevins, op. cit., p. 641.

5 Alfred Vagts: Deutschland und die Vereinigten Staaten in der Welt-
politik (New York, 1935), Vol. I, p. 511.

6 Ibid., Vol. II, p. 1266 n.

90

THE AGE OF REFORM

Cubans was one with which the Populist elements in the country
could readily identify themselves, and they added their voice
to the general cry throughout the country for an active policy
of intervention. After the defeat of Bryan, popular frustration
in the silver areas, blocked on domestic issues, seemed to find
expression in the Cuban question. Here at last was a point at
which the goldbugs could be vanquished. Neither the big busi-
ness and banking community nor the Cleveland and McKinley
administrations had much sympathy with the crusading fever
that pervaded the country at large, and there were bitter mutual
recriminations between conservative and Populist papers. Wall
Street was accused of a characteristic indifference to the inter-
ests of humanity; the Populists in return were charged with
favoring war as a cover under which they could smuggle in an
inflationary policy. One thing seems clear: "most of the leading
Congressional backers of intervention in Cuba represented
southern and western states where Populism and silver were
strongest” 7 And it appears that one of the reasons why Mc-
Kinley was advised by many influential Republicans to yield to
the popular demand for war was the common fear, still mean-
ingful in 1898, that the Democrats would go into the next presi-
dential election with the irresistible slogan of Free Silver and
Free Cuba as its battle cry. 8 Jingoism was confined to no class,
section, or party; but the Populist areas stood in the vanguard,
and their pressure went far to bring about a needless war. When
the war was over, the economic and emotional climate in which
their movement had grown no longer existed, and their forces
were scattered and confused. A majority of them, after favoring
war, attempted honorably to spurn the fruits of war by taking
up the cause of anti-imperialism. Thomas E. Watson, one of the
few Populists who had consistently opposed the war, later in-

7 J. E. Wisan: The Cuban Crisis as Reflected in the New York Press
(New York, 1934), p. 455, for the relation of this crisis to the public tem-
per of the nineties, see Richard Hofstadter: "Manifest Destiny and the
Philippines,” m Daniel Aaron, ed.: America in Crisis (New York, 1952).

8 Vagts, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 1308 n.

91

Chapter n: The Folklore of Populism

sisted that “The Spanish War finished us. The blare of the bugle
drowned the voice of the reformer/' 9 The cause of reform was,
in fact, too resilient to be permanently crushed by a short war;
but, for the moment, Free Cuba had displaced Free Silver in
public interest, and when reform raised its head again, it had
a new face.

As we review these aspects of Populist emotion, an odd paral-
lel obtrudes itself. Where else in American thought during this
period do we find this militancy and nationalism, these apoca-
lyptic forebodings and drafts of world-political strategies, this
hatred of big businessmen, bankers, and trusts, these fears of
immigrants and urban workmen, even this occasional toying
with anti-Semitic rhetoric? We find them, curiously enough,
most conspicuous among a group of men who are in all obvious
respects the antithesis of the Populists. During the late 1880’s
and the Ws there emerged in the eastern United States a small
imperialist elite representing, in general, the same type that had
once been Mugwumps, whose spokesmen were such solid and
respectable gentlemen as Henry and Brooks Adams, Theodore
Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, John Hay, and Albert J. Bever-
idge. While the silverites were raging openly and earnestly
against the bankers and the Jews, Brooks and Henry Adams
were expressing in their sardonic and morosely cynical private
correspondence the same feelings, and acknowledging with
bemused irony their kinship at this point with the mob. While
Populist Congressmen and newspapers called for war with
England or Spain, Roosevelt and Lodge did the same, and
while Mrs. Lease projected her grandiose schemes of world
partition and tropical colonization, men like Roosevelt, Lodge,
Beveridge, and Mahan projected more realistic plans for the
conquest of markets and the annexation of territory. While
Populist readers were pondering over Donnelly’s apocalyptic
fantasies, Brooks and Henry Adams were also bemoaning the
approaching end of their type of civilization, and even the

9 Woodward: Tom Watson, p. 334.

92

THE AGE OF REFORM

characteristically optimistic T. R. could share at moments in
"Brooks Adams’ gloomiest anticipations of our gold-ridden,
capitalist-bestridden, usurer-mastered future.” Not long after
Mrs. Lease wrote that "we need a Napoleon in the industrial
world who, by agitation and education, will lead the people to
a realizing sense of their condition and the remedies,” 1 Roose-
velt and Brooks Adams talked about the threat of the eight-hour
movement and the danger that the country would be "enslaved”
by the organizers of the trusts, and played with the idea that
Roosevelt might eventually lead "some great outburst of the
emotional classes which should at least temporarily crush the
Economic Man.” 2

Not only were the gentlemen of this imperialist elite better
read and better fed than the Populists, but they despised them.
This strange convergence of unlike social elements on similar
ideas has its explanation, I believe, in this: both the imperialist
elite and the Populists had been bypassed and humiliated by the
advance of industrialism, and both were rebelling against the
domination of the country by industrial and financial capitalists.
The gentlemen wanted the power and status they felt due them.

1 Lease, op. cit., p. 7. Thomas E. Watson wrote m 1902 a lengthy
biography: Napoleon a Sketch of His Life, Character, Struggles, and
Achievements, in which Napoleon, “the moneyless lad from despised Cor-
sica, who stormed the high places of the world, and by his own colossal
strength of character, genius, and industry took them,” is calmly described
as “the great Democratic despot” Elsewhere Watson wrote: “There
is not a railway king of the present day, not a single self-made man who
has risen from the ranks to become chief m the vast movement of capital
and labor, who will not recognize m Napoleon traits of his own character;
the same unflagging purpose, tireless persistence, silent plotting, pitiless
rush to victory . . — which caused Watson's biographer to ask what a
Populist was doing celebrating the virtues of railroad kings and erecting
an image of capitalist acquisitiveness for his people to worship. “Could it
be that the Israelites worshipped the same gods as the Philistines' 3 Could it
be that the only quarrel between the two camps was over a smgular dis-
parity m the favors won?” Woodward, op. cit , pp. 340-2.

2 Matthew Josephson- The President Makers (New York, 1940), p. 98.

See the first three chapters of Josephson’s volume for a penetrating account
of the imperialist ehte. Daniel Aaron has an illuminating analysis of Brooks
Adams m his Men of Good Hope (New York, 1951).

93

Chapter h: The Folklore of Populism

which had been taken away from their class and type by the
arriviste manufacturers and railroaders and the all-too-potent
banking houses. The Populists wanted a restoration of agrarian
profits and popular government. Both elements found them-
selves impotent and deprived in an industrial culture and
balked by a common enemy. On innumerable matters they dis-
agreed, but both were strongly nationalistic, and amid the des-
pairs and anxieties of the nineties both became ready for war
if that would unseat or even embarrass the moneyed powers, or
better still if it would topple the established political structure
and open new opportunities for the leaders of disinherited farm-
ers or for ambitious gentlemen. But if there seems to be in this
situation any suggestion of a forerunner or analogue of modern
authoritarian movements, it should by no means be exaggerated.
The age was more innocent and more fortunate than ours, and
by comparison with the grimmer realities of the twentieth cen-
tury many of the events of the nineties take on a comic-opera
quality. What came in the end was only a small war and a quick
victory; when the farmers and the gentlemen finally did coalesce
in politics, they produced only the genial reforms of Progressiv-
ism; and the man on the white horse turned out to be just a
graduate of the Harvard boxing squad, equipped with an im-
mense bag of platitudes, and quite willing to play the demo-
cratic game.

((( 94 )))

CHAPTER III

FROM PATHOS TO PARITY

i. Success through Failure

A

aTjx. paradox pervades modern interpretations of the agrarian
revolt of the nineties. On one hand the failure of the revolt has
been described again and again as the final defeat of the Ameri-
can farmer. John Hicks, in his history of the movement, speaks
of the Populists as having begun “the last phase of a long "and
perhaps a losing struggle — the struggle to save agricultural
America from the devouring jaws of industrial America/' while
another historian calls Populism “the last united stand of the
country's agricultural interest . . . the final attempt made by
the farmers of the land to beat back an industrial civilization
whose forces had all but vanquished them already .” 1 On the
other hand, it has been equally common to enumerate, as evi-
dence of the long-range power of Populism, the substantial list
of once derided Populist proposals that were enacted within
less than twenty years after the defeat of Bryan, and to assign to
the agrarian agitations of the Populist era an important influ-
ence on the golden age of Progressive reform . 2 How can a move-
ment whose program was in the long run so generally successful
be identified with such a final and disastrous defeat for the class
it was supposed to represent?

1 The Populist Revolt , p. 237; Louis Hacker in Hacker and Kendrick:
The United States since 1865 (New York, ed. 1949), p. 253. For a similar
view see Woodward: Tom Watson , p. 330.

2 Hicks: The Populist Revolt, chapter xv; Hacker and Kendrick, op. cit.,
pp. 257, 352-3.

95

Chapter m: From Pathos to Parity

There is something valid in both these views. Populism and
Bryanism were the last attempt to incorporate what I have
called the “soft” side of the farmer’s dual character into a na-
tional mass movement. But the further conclusion that the
eclipse of this sort of reform represents the total and final defeat
of agriculture is no more than the modem liberal’s obeisance to
the pathos of agrarian rhetoric. After the defeat of Populism
and Bryanism and the failure of the agrarian catchwords, the
"hard” side of the farmers’ movements, based upon the com-
mercial realities of agriculture, developed more forcefully and
prosperously than ever. It was during the twenty years after
McKonley routed Bryan that American agriculture enjoyed its
greatest prosperity under modem peacetime conditions, prior to
1945-55; and it was the same twenty years that saw agriculture
make the greatest gains it had ever made in the sphere of na-
tional legislation.

The failure of a political movement based upon the old
phrases of agrarian ideology must not be identified with the fail-
ure of commercial agriculture as an economic interest. Certainly
no one would maintain that even a victory for Bryan in 1896
could have seriously delayed the industrialization of the country
and the relative shrinkage of the rural farm population. But it can
be said that the Populist movement, despite its defeat, activated
a stream of agrarian organization and protest that subsequently
carried point after point. Before these victories could be won it
was necessary that both the market situation of agriculture and
the political climate of the country should change. The attempt
to make agrarianism into a mass movement based upon third-
party ideological politics also had to be supplanted by the mod-
em methods of pressure politics and lobbying within the frame-
work of the existing party system. Populism was the expression
of a transitional stage in the development of our agrarian poli-
tics: while it reasserted for the last time some old ways of
thought, it was also a harbinger of the new. American agricul-
tural leaders were spurred by its achievements and educated by

96

THE AGE OF REFORM

its failures. Far from being the final defeat of the farmer, it was
the first uncertain step in the development of effective agrarian
organization.

Agrarian organization in the United States has veered
back and forth between two kinds of programs: those based
primarily upon local and regional problems and carried out
chiefly through nonpartisan action, and those based upon
broader and more comprehensive goals and tending toward
third-party action. The Granger movement of the 1870’s had
emphasized action within the states, and only in 1875 and 1876,
when it was already declining in numbers and prestige, did it
hesitantly reach out toward national legislation. 3 The various
Farmers’ Alliances, which mark the beginnings of the Populist
Party, also began as business, educational, and social organiza-
tions, often quite explicitly nonpartisan. Unlike the Granges,
they moved rapidly and decisively toward political action, and
as farmers flocked into the Alliance movement in the late 1880’s,
the possibility of third-party action became more and more real.
After an imposing original success in the state and Congres-
sional elections of 1890, the Populists proceeded with much
enthusiasm to organize for the presidential election of 1892. In
the South the Alliancemen had worked chiefly through the
Democratic Party; but the nomination of Grover Cleveland by
the Democrats in 1892, which showed that both major parties
were in the hands of conservatives unsympathetic to the farmers,
clinched the drive for a nationwide third-party movement.

The move toward third-party politics seems to have been a
realistic way of dramatizing the aims of the Alliancemen. The
forces they were fighting, the problems they were trying to
solve, were too powerful, too complex for any agency weaker
or less inclusive than the federal government, and the two major
parties had been discouragingly indifferent to their demands.
The agrarian myth, which taught them that any government

3 Solon J. Buck: The Granger Movement (Cambridge, 1933), p. 122.

97

Chapter m: From Fathos to Parity

was a failure that did not foster the interests of the agricultural
class, liberated the farm leaders from allegiance to the prevail-
ing notions of laissez faire and left them without inhibitions
about advocating whatever federal measure seemed likely to
aid the farmers, whether it was government ownership of trans-
portation or government warehousing.

But third-party leaders in the United States must look for
success in terms different from those that apply to the major
parties, for in those terms third parties always fail. No third
party has ever won possession of the government or replaced
one of the major parties. (Even the Republican Party came into
existence as a new major party, created out of sections of the
old ones, not as a third party grown to major-party strength.)
Third parties have often played an important role in our politics,
but it is different in kind from the role of the governing parties . 4
Major parties have lived more for patronage than for principles;
their goal has been to bind together a sufficiently large coalition
of diverse interests to get into power; and once in power, to ar-
range sufficiently satisfactory compromises of interests to remain
there. Minor parties have been attached to some special idea
or interest, and they have generally expressed their positions
through firm and identifiable programs and principles. Their
function has not been to win or govern, but to agitate, educate,
generate new ideas, and supply the dynamic element in our
political life. When a third party’s demands become popular
enough, they are appropriated by one or both of the major
parties and the third party disappears. Third parties are like
bees: once they have stung, they die.

If third parties are judged by the adoption of their principles,
their history records some notable successes. Even the obscure

4 See the astute essay by John D. Hicks: “The Third Party Tradition in
American Politics,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review , Vol. XX (June
1933), pp. 3-28; cf. also Arthur N. Holcombe: The Political Parties of To-
day (New York, 1924), chapter xi, on the types of minor parties, see Ar-
thur M. Schlesmger: The American as Reformer (Cambndge, 1950),
pp. 54 ff

98

THE AGE OF REFORM

Anti-Masonic Party brought the national convention into our
political system in place of the party caucus. The Liberty and
Free-Soil parties of the pre-Civil War era were notoriously suc-
cessful in forcing the slavery issue into the center of politics.
The moral and intellectual leverage exerted by the Socialist
Party and Socialist ideas m the Progressive era has never been
sufficiently recognized. The People’s — or Populist — Party is a
striking case of the exertion of broad influence by a relatively
small force through third-party action.

If third-party leaders always accepted the premise that third
parties are destined to this peculiar kind of failure-in-success,
they might not have the courage and initiative to start their
crusades. What the founders of the People’s Party thought they
were trying to do is not altogether clear, but they seem to have
been misled by the early local successes of the movement and
by the more than one million votes cast for General Weaver in
the presidential election of 1892 into believing that they had
a major-party future. What most impresses the historian, how-
ever, is the negligible chance they had to replace a major party.
In 1892 General Weaver had 8.5 per cent of the total vote — and
it may help to gauge the dimensions of his support if we remem-
ber that this was much closer, say, to Debs’s 5.9 per cent in 1912
than it was to La Follette’s 16.6 per cent in 1924. The sharp sec-
tional confinement of Populist support is also worth noting.
Weaver was strong in a few plains and mountain states and a
half-dozen states of the South. But throughout a great range of
states which controlled over 55 per cent of the electoral college,
including, in the West, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois, and rang-
ing eastward through all the Middle Atlantic and New England
states and southward to Virginia, the Populist Party was almost
invisible, receiving everywhere less than 5 per cent of the total
vote. There were only nine states, several of them sparsely
populated, in which Weaver got the vote of more than one third
of the electorate. Plainly the Populists had shown strength
enough to influence the local character of the major parties in

Chaptek m: From Pathos to Parity 99

several states, or to form a small bloc in the Senate, but little
more.

These limitations upon the appeal of the People’s Party are
not hard to understand. As a third-party movement, it was con-
fined to the areas of the most acute agricultural discontent
where one-crop cash staple farming, heavily dependent upon
the export market, was found in combination with exceptional
transportation problems or a high rate of mortgaged indebted-
ness. It was feeble everywhere else, except in the thinly popu-
lated mountain states. The middle classes, which often took
seriously the hysterical literature describing the Populists as
anarchists or socialists, either ridiculed or feared them. Work-
ingmen did not vote consciously as a class; and between the
Knights of Labor, which was dying, and the American Federa-
tion of Labor, which was in its infancy, there was hardly a labor
movement to speak of. 5 Eastern farmers who had acute prob-
lems and discontents of their own, looked upon Western farm-
ers as competitors and enemies, and realized that the Populist
proposals were not designed to meet their needs. 6 But what was
perhaps most decisive in the sectional confinement of Populism
was its failure to gain a following in the farm-belt states of the
old Northwest that only ten or fifteen years before had been
leading centers of disaffection. By 1892, states like Iowa, Illinois,
and Wisconsin had long since passed the period of their most

5 The experience of Illinois suggested that when labor became class-
conscious enough to play an independent pohtical role, it tended toward
collectivist programs that were incompatible with the usual Populist out-
look. Cf. Chester McA. Destler: American Radicalism , 1865—1901 (New
London, 1946), chapters viii, ix, xi. Cf. Daniel M. Feins: Labors Role in
the Populist Movement, 1890-96, unpublished M.A. thesis, Columbia Uni-
versity, 1939.

6 Lee Benson: The New York Farmers' Rejection of Populism: the Back-
ground, unpubhshed M A. thesis, Columbia University, 1948. American
farmers had much m common ideologically, but such was the heterogeneity
of American agriculture that then concrete interests often conflicted
head-on. For an account of some of these differences see Herman C.
Nixon: "The Cleavage withm the Farmers' Alliance Movement," Missis-
sippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. XV (June 1928), pp. 22-33.

100

THE AGE OF REFORM

intense speculative development; they had reckoned with their
railroads and middlemen during the Granger era, and their
grievances were much less acute than those in the regions far-
ther west. Above all, the prosperous and ready-cash industry of
dairying and the more stable corn-hog complex — neither of
which was as dependent upon exports and the world market as
wheat or cotton — had replaced wheat in a great many areas. 7
A substantial local urban market had grown up in these states,
and agriculture generally was more prosperous. Not only did
Weaver lose these states in 1892, but even Bryan, running
under a major-party label during a severe depression four years
later, lost Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, and with
them enough electoral support to lose the election. In these
states the steady advance of the cow and the hog had done at
least as much as Mark Hanna's slush fund to temper the force
of the agrarian crusade.

In the Congressional and state elections of 1894 the Populists
reached their maximum strength, but there was evidence that
the movement had already passed its peak as a third-party force.
While the two major parties were both still nationally controlled
by conservatives, they were flexible enough at the local level, in

7 There was in fact an almost direct relation m the West between the
prevalence of the wheat crop and the centers of third-party action. For an
excellent account of the stabilizing effects of diversification and the de-
velopment of dairying and corn-hog farming, see Chester McA Destler:
“Agricultural Readjustment and Agrarian Unrest m Illinois, 1880-1896, 1 ”
Agricultural History , Vol. XXI (April 1947), pp. 104-16. See Benton H.
Wilcox: “An Historical Definition of Northwestern Radicalism,” Mississippi
Valley Historical Review , Vol. XXVI (December 1939), pp. 377-94 and
the same author's A Reconsideration of the Character and Economic Basis
of Northwestern Radicalism , unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of
Wisconsin, 1933, pp. 56-8 and passim for an illuminating discussion of
Northwestern regional differentiation Clyde O. Ruggles: “The Economic
Basis of the Greenback Movement m Iowa and Wisconsin,” Mississippi
Valley Historical Association Proceedings , Vol VI (1912-13), pp. 142-65,
es P PP* 154-7, shows how the development of diversification and dairying
had m earlier years cramped the support of Greenbackism as later it was
to do to Populism. For the situation in prosperous Iowa see Herman C.
Nixon: “The Populist Movement m Iowa,” Iowa Journal of History and
Politics , Vol. XXIV (January 1926), esp. pp. 3-45, 68—70, 99-100, 103-7.

101

Chapter hi: From Pathos to Parity

areas where Populists were strong, to head off the movement
In Kansas, where the Populist victory in 1892 had been decisive
enough for solid control of the legislature, the Populists had
been lured by the Republicans into a futile “legislative war”
and had failed to enact any important legislation. 8 Experience
elsewhere — in Minnesota, for example, and Nebraska — made it
clear that where die Populists had programs designed to cope
with major local grievances of the farmers, their issues were
either appropriated by the major parties in sufficient measure to
drain off their strength or incorporated by the Populists in faulty
legislation that did not stand the test of the hostile conservative
courts. 9 In the South the Negro question was used effectively to
divert attention from reform. Populists were driven, after 1893,
to look more searchingly for a general issue that would give
them a broad national appeal, unite their sectional fragments,
and constitute a challenge to the relatively inflexible national
leadership of the major parties.

Here it is necessary to consider the nature of Populist leader-
ship. Farmers had never drawn their political leaders from their
own ranks, but rather from a ragged elite of professional men,
rural editors, third-party veterans, and professional reformers—
men who had had much experience in agitation but little or no
experience with responsibility or power. 1 It is significant that

8 Elizabeth N, Barr, in William E. Connelley: A Standard History of
Kansas and Kansans , Vol II (Chicago, 1918), pp. 1167 £F

9 Hicks. The Populist Revolt , chapter x; on the situation in Minnesota
see Hicks : “The People's Party m Minnesota," Minnesota History Bulletin ,
Vol. V (November 1924), pp. 547 ff.

1 Even Iowa, with its substantial farmers, sent to Congress between
1844 and 1938 only 15 farmers out of a total of 419 elected Congressmen.
Other representatives were from the professions (309 were lawyers) and
business Of the 15 farmers, 12 were elected between 1844 and 1890 and
3 between 1932 and 1938 — not one during the years from 1890 to 1932.
Johnstone: “Old Ideals versus New Ideas,” pp. 156-7. On the problem of
leadership see also Hicks: The Populist Revolt , pp. 151-2.

An exploration of the Donnelly papers suggests that in the organization
of the Alliance m Minnesota the rural middle class played a crucial part.
Farmers were too busy to be available for lecturing or organizing, but men
whose farming was overshadowed by their other business interests — small

102

THE AGE OF REFORM

the leadership of this “radical” movement included a surpris-
ingly large number of old men bom in the Jackson era, gray-
haired veterans of innumerable Granger, Greenback, and anti-
monopoly campaigns. Many, like General Weaver, were men
with a deep passion for justice; some were cranks or careerists
who had failed to find a place for themselves within the estab-
lished political machines. Many had been subsisting for long
years upon a monotonous diet of failure, and to them it ap-
peared that with the crisis of the nineties the time had at last
come for one of the third-party movements to succeed. They
hungered for success as major-party leaders knew it, and this
left them open to temptation: they could, without too much dif-
ficulty, be persuaded to give up a large part of their program if
they felt that this was the way to win.

The Populist leaders, moreover, had been confronted all along
with a besetting weakness that was hardly any fault of their
own: lack of funds. It has been too little understood that be-
cause of the small sums of money available to the Populists their
movement was almost from the beginning — and out of necessity,
not out of corruption — for sale cheap. It found its takers in the
silver interests. Farmers, it should be remembered, were often
generous with enthusiasm but could rarely afford to be generous
with cash. It was difficult to get many poverty-ridden farmers to
part, literally, with a nickel, and the Farmers’ Alliance, the
Peoples Party, the innumerable little newspapers that were the
organs of the movement, were all shoestring operations. For in-
stance, the treasurer s report of the Alliance for 1890 — a year
when the organization claimed more than one million affili-
ated farmers — showed receipts from membership fees of only

merchants who sold to farmers and were dependent upon their prosperity,
for instance — were able to undertake such tasks. For them it was possible
to combine the functions of agitation and salesmanship. This need of the
movement for leaders also gave an opportunity for country cranks to find a
pleasant vocational outlet for their notions. For this reason one cannot al-
ways be sure to what extent the more extreme manifestations of Populist
thinking were representative of the farmers themselves rather than of such
rural agitators.

103

Chapter hi: From Pathos to Parity

$11,231. At five cents each the membership should have been
able to provide $50,000! 2 When the Populists of Iowa were en-
gaged in their state campaign of 1895, repeated pleas for cam-
paign funds had to be supplemented by a five-cent assessment —
which yielded $317. 3 Sometimes substantial farmers were will-
ing and eager to help but almost completely unable to do so
because they were land-poor. One of them wrote to Ignatius
Donnelly: "The . . . effort I have made for existence since
August 29, 1881 places me in a position unable to advance a dol-
lar for the most Riteous Cause on earth. Onely upon one condi-
tion, and that is if you can send me a man who will put up $35.
per acre for 240 acres ($8400) with crops. I will advance $800.
... I not onely will advance this 800 but will put on the har-
ness and work till victory is ours.” 4 The meager amounts with
which political campaigns were conducted in the early days of
the Populist Party were indeed pathetic. Some of its leaders be-
lieved in 1891 that they could elect their entire state ticket in
Kentucky if they had a few thousand dollars to spend. 5 By early
August of the following year they had collected only $400 for
their state ticket in Minnesota, though pledged sums uncollected
were far greater. 6 In 1892 they were hoping to raise $2,000 for
their campaign in the three states of Arkansas, Georgia, and
Florida. 7

Between 1889 and 1893, three things happened that gave an
immense impetus to the silver movement. In 1889-90 six new

2 Orville M. Kile: The Farm Bureau Movement (New York, 1921),

p. 28.

3 Nixon: “The Populist Movement in Iowa,” p. 81; cf. the lament re-
coided on p. 82.

4 A. L D. Austin to Ignatius Donnelly, June 19, 1896, Donnelly Papers.

6 H. E. Taubeneck to Donnelly, July 2, 1891.

6 Donnelly to K. Halvorson, August 5, 1892.

7 Taubeneck to Donnelly, July 27, August 4, 1892 The same difficulty
had attended the organization of the Alliance itself. “The most serious ob-
struction m my way of organizing Alliances is the absence of the fifty
cents,” wrote one organizer to Donnelly. Another: “. . . m some places
money was so scarce it was hard to get 7 men who had 50 cents each.”
A farmer wrote: “We farmers are poor but I think we can surely con-

104

THE AGE OF REFORM

Western states with strong silver movements — Idaho, Montana,
North Dakota, South Dakota, Washington, and Wyoming —
were admitted to the Union, expanding considerably the silver
bloc in the Senate. In 1893 the depression broke, bringing hard
times to many regions that had been spared some of the worst
consequences of the price decline, and arousing interest in old
panaceas. In the same year the federal fiscal crisis and the repeal
of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act at the instance of Grover
Cleveland further angered the silver inflationists and spurred
the silver-mining interests of the West to action.

Free coinage of silver was not distinctively a People’s Party
idea, nor was it considered one of the more "radical” planks in
the People’s Party program. The Kansas Republicans, for in-
stance, had regularly included free silver in their platforms for
years, and there was a large silver bloc in both major parties in
Congress. Almost half the Democrats in the Plouse of Repre-
sentatives had voted for an unsuccessful free-coinage amend-
ment to the bill repealing die Silver Purchase Act. Gold mono-
metallism, after all, had been American policy only since the
1870’s, and it was still possible in the early 1890’s for a man to
stand for free silver as a return to an old policy rather than as a
drastic innovation. Free silver inherited the old banners of
American monetary inflationism that had been kept waving
since the Civil War by the Greenbackers. And while free silver
has been much ridiculed, and rightly so, as the single cure-all
of the popular thought of the nineties, it is worth remembering
that from the debtor’s standpoint silver inflation, however in-
adequate, was not a totally unfitting expedient.

To the most steadfast Populist radicals, however — among
them men like Henry Demarest Lloyd, who hoped to make of
Populism the first step in an American social-democratic move-

tribute 10$ apiece.” Letters to Donnelly, June 10, 11, 1890, July 18, 1891.
The Donnelly Papers are full of such evidence. Unable to provide Alliance
lecturers with salaries, the leaders tried to meet the problem by giving
them a sales agency for hail and crop insurance. In Mmnesota this precipi-
tated a fight over the control of such insurance companies.

105

Chapter hi: From Pathos to Parity

ment — free silver was a snare and a delusion. The original
Populist program had embraced a number of reforms aimed to
meet the central problems of land, transportation, and finance;
those who stood for this balanced platform, with its demand for
government ownership of communications and government aid
to farm credits, felt that free silver was a dangerous obsession
that threatened to distract attention from the full scope of the
reform movement. 8 The majority, however, of the "practical,”
success-hungry leaders of the People’s Party, like General Weaver
and its permanent national chairman, Herman Taubeneck of
Illinois, saw in free silver the one issue by which the third-party
movement could broaden its base among the electorate. The
party became a battleground between a minority who wished
to adhere to the original and "pure” Populist program, including
those planks that were considered ultraradical and collectivist,
and a majority who hoped to succeed through silver.

In making their decision to go all the way with silver, the
leaders gambled everything on one premise: that neither the
Republican Party of Mark Hanna nor the Democratic Party of
Grover Cleveland would accept free silver by 1896. In this case
it seemed reasonably certain that the large silver factions in
both parties would bolt (as indeed the silver Republicans did).
Then, it was expected, all the silver forces would unite in a new
party, which would actually have the stature of a major party
and in which the People’s Party leaders would certainly play a
major role. These leaders were trying, in short, to build the
silver issue into a bridge that would connect them with the
silver forces in the major parties. They did succeed in building
the bridge, but as it turned out, the traffic that crossed it moved
in the opposite direction from what they had hoped.

It was at this point that the role of the organized silver move-
ment became crucial. No history of this movement has been
written, and everything said about it here is based upon frag-
mentary evidence; but there is reason to believe that it turned

8 Cf. Miller: The Populist Party in Kansas , pp. 144-7, 162.

106

THE AGE OF REFORM

out one of the best promotional jobs in our history. It did not
have lavish funds at its disposal, even by the standards of the
time. But it had the only substantial funds among the forces of
dissent, and it used them to great effect. It subsidized editors,
politicians, and pamphleteers; it organized annual silver conven-
tions in several states of the Union; and through such agencies
as the American Bimetallic League it spread everywhere among
receptive audiences the notion that all the country’s basic ills
could be cured by the single expedient of free coinage of silver.

The problem confronting the People’s Party leaders was
whether to fight this effort of the silver forces to impose a single
issue upon the reform movement or to go along with it and join
the silver chorus. To accept silver meant to soft-pedal the other
issues, not only because the dynamic of the free-silver panacea
tended to displace them but also because accepting silver meant
reaching out for conservative support (like that of the silver-
mine owners ) that frowned on other Populist issues. The practi-
cal leaders went along with silver. Many of them feared, as
Taubeneck put it in a letter to Donnelly, that if they lost touch
with the groundswell for silver, the People’s Party, instead of
being the new party of the left, would be merely “the forerunner
of a great third party that is to be organized, as the Abolition
Party was to the Republican party.” 9

It became clear, as the time approached for the 1896 Demo-
cratic convention in Chicago, that, contrary to Populist expecta-
tions, the silver forces predominated. When the Democrats
adopted the free-silver platform by a vote of better than two to
one, the Populists considered nominating Senator Teller, the
leader of the schismatic silver Republicans; but when Teller
himself endorsed Bryan, they were left out on a limb. Their sole
issue — silver — was in the hands of Bryan and the Democrats. If
they nominated their own candidate and stressed their own plat-
form, they were not only sure of losing most of their votes to
Bryan but also — as they thought — in danger of drawing away

9 Taubeneck to Donnelly, January 29, 1894, Donnelly Papers.

107

Chapter m: From Pathos to Parity

from him just enough votes to defeat him and elect McKinley.
If they endorsed Bryan, their identity as a party was surely at
an end. The cry for victory carried the day, and after much
chicanery on the part of the fusionists the Populist convention
at St. Louis endorsed Bryan and committed suicide . 1 It was a
bitter pill for the principled reformers in the party, who saw
clearly the inadequacy of the free-silver panacea and above all
for the Southern Populists who had built their party in the teeth
of the stubbornest and often the most unscrupulous resistance
by the Southern Democrats.

Henry Demarest Lloyd insisted that most Populists would
privately admit that “they knew silver was only the most trifling
installment of reform” and that “many — a great many did not
conceal their belief that it was no reform at all.” “The delegates,”
he complained, “knew perfectly well that the silver miners were
spending a great deal of money and politics to get them to do
just what they were doing,” but he concluded that their will to
insist upon their integrity and their full quota of reforms had
been paralyzed by their desire for success and their fear of
disunity among the reform forces . 2 Privately he admitted that
the Populists had long since paved the way for their own down-
fall by their acceptance of the silver issue: “The masses have
been taught by us that "silver is the issue , and they will of
course have the common sense to give their votes to the most
powerful of the parties promising it.” He saw clearly that the
leadership of the reform party had undergone a remarkable

1 For the story of the strategy of the silver forces, see Elmer Ellis:
Henry Moore Teller ( Caldwell, 1941 ) and “The Silver Republicans m the
Election of 1896,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review , Vol. XVIII ( March
1932), pp. 519-34 Much light is shed on the movement for silver and
fusion by Hicks: Populist Revolt, chapters xi-xiv, Woodward: Watson,
chapters xvi, xvii; Destler: American Radicalism , chapter xi; Nixon:
“Populist Movement m Iowa,” pp. 67-100, Fred E. Haynes: James Baird
Weaver (Iowa City, 1919), chapter xvi; Hicks: “The People's Party m
Minnesota,” pp. 548-58; Barnes: Carlisle, pp. 263-4 and chapter xvn, esp.
pp. 433, 448.

2 Henry Demarest Lloyd: “The Populists at St. Louis,” American Re-
view of Reviews, Vol. XIV (September 1896), p. 303.

108

THE AGE OF REFORM

degree of concentration, though he seems not to have under-
stood how thoroughly in keeping this was with the history of
the agrarian movement: “Curious that the new party, the Re-
form party, the People’s party, should be more boss-ridden, ring-
ruled, gang-gangrened than the two old parties of monopoly.
The party that makes itself the special champion of the Refer-
endum and Initiative tricked out of its very life and soul by a
permanent National Chairman — something no other party has!
Our Initiative and Referendum had better begin, like charity,
at home !” 3

Those writers who have given their sympathy to the Lloyds
and the Watsons have implicitly or openly condemned the
abandonment of their rounded and intelligible set of reforms in
favor of the will-o’-the-wisp of free silver. As convincing evi-
dence of the soundness of the original program, they point to
the Populist proposals that eventually became law: railroad reg-
ulation, the income tax, an expanded currency and credit struc-
ture, direct election of Senators, the initiative and referendum,
postal savings banks, even the highly controversial subtreasury
plan. It is precisely the enactment of so much of this program
within a twenty-year period that gives us some cause to feel
that third-party action was reasonably successful after all. The
People’s Party seems to have fulfilled its third-party function. It
transformed one of the major parties, had a sharp impact on the
other, and in the not too long run saw most of its program be-
come law. Who succeeded — in the end? The silver miners did
not get free silver, and the bones of the Weavers, the Tau-
benecks, and the Donnellys soon lay bleaching on the sands
in silent testimony to the sacrificial function of third-party
leaders. But the cause itself went marching on, and the 4 pure”
Populists had the satisfaction of seeing plank after plank of their
platforms made law by the parties whose leaders had once dis-
missed them as lunatics. Forming a third party was no way to

3 Caro Lloyd: Henry Demarest Lloyd , Vol. I, pp. 259-60; cf. chap-

ter xii, passim.

109

Chapter hi: From Pathos to Parity

win office, but given some patience, it proved a good way of
getting things done. 4

n. The Golden Age and After

Only two years after McKinley and Hanna inflicted their over-
whelming defeat on the forces of agrarianism, the American
commercial farmer entered upon the longest sustained period of
peacetime prosperity he has ever enjoyed. “There has never
been a time,” declared President Theodore Roosevelt’s Commis-
sion on Country Life in 1909, “when the American farmer was
as well off as he is today, when we consider not only his earning
power, but the comforts and advantages he may secure.” 5 Thus
the “final” victory of industrialism over the farmer was ironically
followed by the golden age of American agriculture, to which
agricultural interests later looked back nostalgically when they
were defining a goal for the nation’s farm policy.

How did all this agricultural well-being come to be, at a time
when the agricultural population was shrinking before the ad-
vance of industrialism and urbanism? The answer is that the
prosperity of the commercial farmers was achieved not only in
spite of but in good part because of the rise of American indus-
try and the American city. Not only this, but the political as well
as the economic position of the farmer in the golden age of

4 One of the circumstances that made the ultimate success of the Peo-

E le’s Party possible was the fact that the two major parties were, and had
een for some years at the time of its formation, precariously balanced in
popular strength. In the elections of 1880, 1884, and 1888, the difference
between their percentages of the total popular vote had not been as much
as one per cent, and in 1892 it was only a fraction over three per cent. The
balance in the electoral college was almost as tenuous. Separated by such a
precarious margin, the major parties could not be complacent about losing
the votes of any substantial element m the population, and the capitulation
of one of them at an early date to the spirit of Populism was therefore
highly probable.

5 Report of the Commission on Country Life ( 1909, ed. Chapel Hill,
1944), p. 36. *

110

THE AGE OF REFORM

American agriculture became measurably stronger year by year
as his numbers, relative to the urban sector, progressively grew
smaller.

A vital part of the change came, of course, simply with the
upturn in prices. The farmer s principal relief at first came from
a detested source — gold. After 1897 the new international sup-
plies of gold brought that inflationary movement which the
farmers had tried to win with silver. The general price level,
which had been sinking steadily for the thirty years before 1896,
turned sharply upward in the closing years of the old century
and continued to rise until the reaction after the first World
War. In the United States wheat went from 72 cents a bushel in
1896 to 98 cents in 1909; corn from 21 cents to 57 cents; cotton
from 6 cents to 14 cents a pound.

However, it was not only the gold inflation but the American
city itself that saved the American farmer. During these very
years of the golden age the farmer in most lines of production
was rapidly losing a large part of his foreign market. 6 What
sustained his prosperity was the very thing that has been cited
as evidence of his political submergence — the great increase of
the urban population. In 1890, 5,737,000 American farms were
supplying a domestic urban population of 22,100,000. Thirty
years later there were only 711,000 additional farms, but there
were 32,000,000 additional urban consumers. Relatively fewer
but larger, more efficient, and more mechanized farms produced
an increasing part of their total produce for the home market,
and less for the foreign market, under far stabler and more
advantageous conditions of transportation and finance than had
prevailed in the past. True, the farm community was not ex-
panding nearly as rapidly as it once had. But this slower and
saner pace of expansion was itself a factor in rural well-being.
And the surplus rural population found in the fast-growing cities

6 See E. G. Nourse: American Agriculture and the European Market
(New York, 1924).

Ill

Chapter m: From Pathos to Parity

an expansive safety valve. Many sons of fanners who were un-
able to accommodate themselves in the farm economy moved
to the cities to find work or carve out careers. 7

The improved position of the commercial farmer led to a
drastic change in dominant conceptions among farm organiza-
tions as to the methods of advancing their interests. The pre-war
gold inflation of course put an end to the primacy of the money
question that had been so characteristic of the agrarian thinking
of the nineties. Where Greenback, Populist, and Bryanite pana-
ceas, arising from a fixation on the quantity of money, had fos-
tered legislative programs aimed above all at increasing the
volume of currency, the new approach was aimed rather at
decreasing and controlling the volume of the farm products
themselves as a means of sustaining or raising prices.

Farm technology and farm acreage had clearly outrun the
growth of the world’s purchasing power. It was increasingly rec-
ognized, as the world market was found to be oversupplied with
agricultural products, that costs, inefficiency, and wastes in dis-
tribution and marketing were at the heart of the farm problem. 8
Two new farmers’ organizations formed in 1902, the American
Society of Equity and the Farmers’ Union, began to point to-
ward the need of controlling the volume of the product and
improving methods of distribution. Their leaders urged the con-
trol of production and the withholding of surpluses from the

7 For the first elaboration of the idea that the growth of the city acted
as a safety valve for agrarian discontent, see Fred A. Shannon: “A Post
Mortem on the Labor-Safety-Valve Theory/' Agricultural History, Vol.
XIX (January 1945) and The Farmers Last Frontier , pp. 356-9. The con-
ception seems to me to have great value, but I cannot follow Professor
Shannon s conclusion that the agrarian distress of the 1890’s can be ex-
plained by the hypothesis that “the cities were approaching a static con-
dition” and that the urban safety valve was closing. On the contrary, urban
growth continued at a very high rate after 1890, and this growth was in
great part responsible for agricultural recovery.

8 See the significant article by James C. Mahn. “The Background of
the First Bills to Establish a Bureau of Markets, 1911-12,” Agricultural
History , Vol. VI (July 1932), pp. 107-29.

112

THE AGE OF REFORM

market through storage schemes. 9 These marketing plans are
suggestive of later New Deal methods and of the "ever normal
granary” idea, except that the theorists of these earlier move-
ments hoped to do the job through voluntary association rather
than under government sponsorship.

Another approach to agricultural prices stemmed from a new
awareness of the exactions of middlemen that was shared by
farmers and urban Progressives who were concerned with the
high cost of living. Urban leaders argued that the farmer could
produce more abundantly, sell more cheaply to the consumer,
and make ample profits, if the exorbitant “take” of the middle-
men could be cut. In 1911, as a result of agitations along these
lines led by the Farmers 5 Union, bills calling for the creation of
a Bureau of Markets in the Department of Agriculture won a
great deal of sympathetic attention in Congress. Finally in 1913
a separate Office of Markets was created (it was later merged
with the Bureau of Agricultural Economics), and after that year,
when David F. Houston became Secretary of Agriculture, the
work of that Department was changed in response to the chang-
ing outlook of agrarian leadership; hitherto devoted almost ex-
clusively to teaching and helping farmers to increase their yield,
the Department of Agriculture now began to give them more
and more information and guidance bearing on the distribution
of their produce. 1

A corollary of this concern with distribution was the develop-
ment of farmers 5 co-operatives, which spread from such well-
organized industries as dairying into other fields. Here, as in so

9 Both organizations are discussed m Saloutos and Hicks: Agricultural
Discontent in the Middle West , 1900-1939 (Madison, 1951), chapters v
and viii See also the manifesto of the founder of the American Society of
Equity, J. A. Eventt: The Third Power (Indianapolis, 1905).

1 See John M. Gaus and Leon O. Wolcott: Public Administration and
the United States Department of Agriculture (Chicago, 1940), pp. 30-47;
Edward Wiest: Agricultural Organization in the United States (Lexington,
Kentucky, 1923), pp. 175 ff. A. C True* A History of Agricultural Experi-
mentation and Research in the United States (Washington, 1937), pp. 213,

113

Chapter hi: From Fathos to Parity

many things, the decade of the nineties marked a turning-point
and the following two decades a period of rapid fruition. Statis-
tics are not entirely reliable, but of the 10,803 marketing and
purchasing organizations listed by the Department of Agricul-
ture in 1925, only 102 had been organized before 1890. There
were probably more associations organized between 1890 and
1895 than in all previous years, and the number grew thereafter
year by year at an accelerated pace until the early 1920’s. In
1928 the total of all business organizations among farmers —
including organizations for credit, mutual insurance, and public
utilities, as well as marketing and purchasing co-operatives —
was estimated at 58,000. 2

The farmers, who had traditionally raged against trusts and
monopolies, now found themselves (it was eloquent testimony
of their coming-of-age as modern businessmen) afoul of the
anti-trust laws. After generations in which no one would have
doubted their anti-monopolist integrity, they were becoming,
however unfairly, targets of the Sherman Act. From 1890 to
1910 many attempts were made to prosecute directors and offi-
cers of farm marketing co-operatives, and although none was
convicted of price-fixing, the legal status of co-operatives re-
mained in doubt until it was defined by statute in several of the
states. 3 Under the terms of the Clayton Anti-Trust Act of 1914,
farmer as well as labor organizations were specifically exempted
from the national anti-trust laws. The Capper-Volstead Act of
1922 further clarified the legal status of co-operative marketing
associations. But the real significance of the prosecutions lay in
the fact that farm leadership was putting less emphasis upon the
traditional fight against big-business organization and more
upon building their own organizations on the business model.

Along with this concern for marketing and organization came

2 On the growth of co-operatives and other associations, see R. H. Els-
worth. Agricultural Cooperative Associations , U S. Department of Agricul-
ture Technical Bulletin No. 40 (Washington, 1928), esp. pp. 2, 6-8.

3 Saloutos and Hicks, op. cit, pp. 63-4, 288.

114

THE AGE OF REFORM

a new respect among farmers for experts. From the passage of
the Morrill Land Grant College Act in 1862 to the end of the
century, fanners had remained persistently hostile to what
they called “book farming,” and agriculture students in the
Morrill land-grant schools had been outnumbered often as much
as five to one by engineering students. 4 Early in the twentieth
century attitudes changed rapidly and applied science began to
influence the thinking of many farmers. M. L. Wilson recalls:
"When I went to Ames to study agriculture in 1902, I was not
the first boy in my Iowa neighborhood to go to college, but I
was the first boy from that neighborhood to go to an agricultural
college. Ten or fifteen years later it was becoming an accepted
thing for all who could afford it. A few farmers began to keep
books, count costs, and calculate where profit came and loss oc-
curred. Still more farmers began to feed their stock scientifically,
following the advice from "Feeders" Hints’ Columns in farm
journals. Alfalfa came in, and farmers became aware of nitrogen
needs of the soil. Dairymen began building up new herds of
high-producing Holsteins. Hardy and rust-resistant strains of
wheat were eagerly accepted by more and more fanners. Hog
men improved their stock and inoculated against cholera. And
finally came the popular demand for county agents — for thor-
oughly trained men to bring to farmers the advantages of scien-
tific training.” 5 The long-standing indifference of the commer-
cial farmer to the techniques of his business was coming to an
end.

Changes in the market position and economic techniques of
the farmer were matched by the changes in his political situ-
ation. The agrarian organizations of the 1890’s had had to work
in an unfriendly atmosphere, with no strong allies in other

4 I. L. Kandel: Federal Aid for Vocational Education (New York,
1917), pp. 98-106 For the early use of the Morrill grants by states, see
Earle D. Ross: Democracy’s College (Ames, Iowa, 1942), chapter iv.

5 M. L. Wilson in O E Baker, R. Borsodi, and M L. Wilson: Agricul-
ture in Modern Life (New York, 1939), pp. 224—5. Wilson probably lo-
cates this change somewhat later than the facts warrant.

115

Chapter hi: From Pathos to Parity

classes and sections. In the Progressive era their isolation was
broken down, and a congenial political climate made it possible
for a number of old agrarian reform proposals to be realized by
the two major parties. Henceforth, except for those who sup-
ported the La Follette campaign in 1924, farmers have generally
been cold to the idea of nationwide third-party action. (On a
state or regional scale organizations like the Non-Partisan
League and the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party have attempted
independent political activity, and have even propagated old
Populist antagonisms and Populist rhetoric.)

With the passing of third-party action and the rise of urban-
ism came a fundamental change in the whole strategy of agrari-
anism. For over a century, when farmers were in a majority, the
ideologists of agrarianism had appealed to majority rule and to
the idea that there is an inherent and necessary relation between
agrarianism and democracy. 6 The political efforts of farmers had
been efforts to secure or underwrite broad popular democracy,
and agrarian thinking had been infused with a strong suspicion
of organized power. Now, as the agrarian sector of the economy
shrank, farmers ceased to think of majority rule and began to
rely increasingly upon minority action — indeed, in the end, upon
minority rule. For minority rule was the salvation of the pros-
perous farmers. One of the most striking features of twentieth-
century American politics has been the way in which the farm
population has gained in political striking power with its relative
losses in numbers, growing more cohesive, more vocal, more
effectual almost in proportion as it has been progressively more
outnumbered. 7 In 1870, 58 per cent of the nation’s gainfully em-

6 On this theme and on modern agrarian politics see Grant McConnell:
The Decline of Agrarian Democracy (Berkeley, 1953), chapter i.

7 Thus Theodore Saloutos remarks, apropos of the Farm Bloc: “Curi-
ously enough . . . the fanners found themselves at political flood-tide
when their numbers had reached the lowest point m history.” Saloutos and
Hicks, op. cit., p. 341. It is worth remarkmg that Populism had served as
a school for leadership for many of the later agranan leaders. Populism not
only taught them what could not be done, but also turned their attention
to the possibilities of legislative action. Men who had been aroused and

116

THE AGE OF REFORM

ployed population earned its living from agriculture, and in 1945
only 15 per cent; yet in the latter year the upper strata among
the farmers had more political weight as a class than they had
had in 1870.

The rise of agrarian strength was based upon the fall in agrar-
ian numbers. The same “relentless” advance of industrialism
and urbanism that, as the pathos of agrarian rhetoric has it,
“crushed” the farmer in the lasting defeat of 1896 has actually
provided him with greater and greater over-representation in our
legislative bodies year by year. The legislative process in the
United States takes place within the framework of a constricting
rotten-borough system that perennially confronts urban constitu-
encies, both in the states and in the nation, with a rural strangle-
hold. Even American cities are prevented from managing their
own affairs by legislatures dominated by rural representatives.
In the Connecticut House of Representatives, for instance, Hart-
ford, which has a population of 166,000, and Colebrook, which
has a population of 547, both have two members. The 4,125,000
urban residents of Los Angeles County have one senator in the
California legislature, while the 13,560 rural inhabitants of Inyo
County have one also. Such inequities are repeated on a nation-
wide scale in Congress. An Ohio district with 908,403 residents
has one Congressman; so does a South Dakota district with 148,-
147 residents. A Texas urban district with 802,000 people has the
same Congressional strength as a rural district in the same state
which has only 226,000 people. The Senate represents this in-
equity in its most extreme form. There, in 1940, the 25 smallest
states, with a total population of 25,200,000, had 50 seats while
the 23 largest states, with a total population of 106,500,000, had

seasoned by the Populist movement played an important part in such later
organizations as the Farmers' Union, the Society of Equity, and the Non-
Partisan League. Ibid., chapter n, and pp. 117, 221; Edward Wiest, op.
cit., p. 475. On later farm leaders with Populist backgrounds see Gilbert C.
Fite: “John A. Simpson,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review , Vol. XXXV
(March 1949), pp. 563-84, and Theodore Saloutos: “William A. Hirth,”
ibid., Vol. XXXVIII (September 1951), pp. 215-32.

117

Chapter m: From Pathos to Parity

46 seats. Thus 19 per cent of the population elected a majority
of the Senate and the remaining 81 per cent were represented
by a minority. The 24 states of the South Atlantic, East South
Central, West South Central and Mountain regions — agrarian
regions, generally — with 35 per cent of the country’s population,
had half the total membership of the Senate. When one con-
siders also the rules of the Senate, which add to the power of
determined minorities, one has a clearer grasp of the agrarian
potential. 8 Much is said in our political discussions about the
big-city machines and their role in politics. It is testimony to the
grip of our agrarian traditions that relatively little attention is
paid by the public to the exorbitant power of rural blocs.

My major concern here, however, is not with the conse-
quences of rural legislative power for our own time, but rather
with the way the farmers after 1896 found it possible to use their
growing over-representation and their growing capacity for po-
litical and economic organization to win reforms that were, in
fact, long overdue. What is most impressive is the contrast be-
tween the periods before and after 1900. During the long period
of price decline and persistent agrarian distress from 1865 to
the turn of the century, farmers had found little sympathy in
the federal government and had won no great measures of
legislative policy designed to give them relief. 9 But in the early

8 There is, of course, a large literature on this aspect of our pohtical
system. I have taken my illustrations from two recent complaints: Rich-
ard L. Neuberger: “Rotten Boroughs and Our Lawless Lawmakers,” The
Progressive , December 1951, pp. 22-4, and Senator Paul Douglas's speech
in the Senate: “The Surrender to the Filibuster,” Congressional Record for
March 17, 1949. See also the discussion by George A. Graham in Morality
in American Politics (New York, 1952), pp 96-109. In any discussion of
the farm problem, it may be desirable to point out that with the growth of
a substantial rural non-farm population, rural over-representation is not
quite identical with over-representation of the farmer. The substantial rural
non-farm population is also over-represented. Urban conservatives, it should
be added, support the continuance of this over-representation.

9 During the Civil War the Republican Party passed three measures,
the Homestead Act, the Morrill Land Grant College Act, and the act cre-
ating the Department of Agriculture (not yet at Cabinet rank), all of
which manifested an interest m agrarian development. But from 1862, the

118

THE AGE OF REFORM

twentieth century, Theodore Roosevelt’s Square Deal and
Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom produced much important
farm legislation. One measure of the increasing services of the
federal government to farmers is the budget of the Department
of Agriculture, which in 1920 was over thirty times as large as
it had been in 1890. 1 Some of the federal measures of value to
the farmer, like the beginning of effective railroad regulation
with the Hepburn Act of 1906 and the passing of the income-tax
amendment, were reminiscent of old Populist proposals.

The list of specifically agricultural measures is imposing.
Among the most important were measures whose goal was to
expand agricultural credits: the Federal Farm Loan Act and
the Warehouse Act of 1916 (the latter of which embodied fea-
tures of the Populist subtreasury scheme). There were educa-
tional measures like the Smith-Lever Act of 1914, which began
the elaborate system of demonstration education for farmers,
and the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917, which gave subsidies to
vocational education in agriculture. There were measures bear-
ing on the marketing and grading and standardization of agri-
cultural produce: the Pure Food and Drug Act ( 1906), the Meat
Inspection Act (1907), the Grain Standards Act (1916), the
Cotton Futures Act (1916), the Rural Post Roads Act (1916).

In the 1920’s, despite the powerful Farm Bloc and a strong
farm lobby, the two outstanding schemes for agricultural price-
fixing, the equalization-fee and export-debenture plans, were
both defeated. The ability of the farmers to command effective
federal action slackened chiefly because of stubborn vetoes by

year m which all these were passed, to the end of the century, the legisla-
tive field was quite barren. The most significant measure of interest to
agriculture was the Hatch Act (1887), creating a system of agricultural
experiment stations under the direction of the land-grant colleges In time
this proved to have great significance. An act of 1889 also raised the De-
partment of Agriculture to Cabinet rank. For a good brief summary see
Arthur P. Chew. The Response of Government to Agriculture (Washing-
ton, 1937); cf. Donald Blaisdell: Government and Agriculture (New York,
1940).

1 Wiest, op. cit, pp. 31 ff., esp. p. 35; on the evolution of the Depart-
ment's structure and functions see Gaus and Wolcott, op. cit., chapters i-v.

119

Chapter ih: From Pathos to Parity

President Coolidge. In the perspective of the 1950’s this rela-
tively lean legislative harvest of the 1920’s appears to be no
more than a temporary check in the political capacity of agricul-
ture. By the end of the twenties the farmers had at least won
common acceptance of the idea that agriculture is "a special
national interest requiring a special public policy.” 2 Under the
New Deal this recognition was institutionalized, as the govern-
ment itself stepped in to make possible what private farm
groups had failed to do — the nationwide organization of farm
producers to maintain prices.

The climactic achievement of the farm lobby was to establish,
as a goal of national policy, the principle of parity — the concept
that it is a legitimate end of governmental policy to guarantee
to one interest in the country a price level for its products that
would yield a purchasing power equal to what that class had
had during its most prosperous period in modern times, the so-
called “base period” of 1909-14. 3 While it would be misleading
to imply that agricultural producers have invariably enjoyed a
parity income since the definition of the policy, it seems hardly
questionable that the agricultural bloc thus succeeded in estab-
lishing for the commercial farmers a claim upon federal policy
that no other single stratum of the population can match. To
gain the acceptance of such a principle, to get more than six
million farmers on the government payroll collecting billions in
the form of parity payments, might be considered triumph
enough for the agricultural interest. But in 1942, during the war,
the exacting power of the Farm Bloc was shown in the most
striking way when Congress wrote into the Emergency Price
Control Act a clause prohibiting the OPA from imposing a price
ceiling of less than 110 per cent of parity on any farm com-
modity. As a consequence many agricultural price floors rose
higher than the consumers' ceilings. Consumers paid the ceiling

2 Griswold, op cit , p 150.

3 For a discussion of the implications of this concept see John D. Black,
Parity, Parity , Parity (Cambridge, 1942), and for its history chapter v of
that work.

120

THE AGE OF REFORM

prices and the government found itself obliged to make up the
differences by paying subsidies to the producers. This exaction
beyond the full measure of parity itself, denounced by President
Roosevelt as an "act of favoritism for one particular group in
the community,” was a remarkable token of the political power
of American agriculture, which had developed, as A. Whitney 1
Griswold remarks, "from a ward of charity into a political force
capable of pursuing its own interests even to the point of defy-
ing the head of the nation in wartime .” 4 Since the war, the
parity issue has been one which all administrations have had to
handle with the greatest care. Thus, a half century after the
defeat of Bryan, while the agrarian rhetoric portrays the farmer
as writhing in the "devouring jaws of industrial America,” the
selfsame industrial America goes on producing the social sur-
pluses out of which the commercial farmers are subsidized . 5

m. The Vanishing Hayseed

In the Populist era the dual identity of the American farmer,
compounded of the soft agrarian traditions and his hard com-
mercial role, had not yet been resolved. The economic, political,
and social changes of the twentieth century tended to favor a
candid acceptance by the fanner of his businesslike role. To be
sure, the agrarian conceptions and the Populist rhetoric sur-
vived, and in some spots still survive, but they cover an increas-
ingly solidified conservatism. One of the clearest symptoms of
this conservatism was the rapid decline of the traditional identi-

4 Griswold, op. cit, p. 157; cf. Black, op. cit., chapters iv, xviii, and
passim,

5 Here again the presence of a large industrial and a small agricultural
sector within the economy has worked to the farmers’ advantage. Since the
urban sector is proportionately large, it can better afford to buy off the
upper strata of the farmers with subsidies than it could if there were more
farmers and fewer city people. This is one reason why the farmers of
western Canada are more radical than those of the United States. A sug-
gestive comparison may be found m Seymour M. Lipset: Agrarian Social-
ism (Berkeley, 1950).

121

Chapter m: From Pathos to Parity

fication with all laboring men, the growing tendency of sub-
stantial farmers to think of themselves as businessmen and em-
ployers. With the increasing mechanization of farming and the
rise of berry, fruit, and vegetable crops relying more than ever
upon migratory agricultural labor, substantial farmers thought
of their workers less and less as familiar laborers and apprentice
farmers. This process took place in different areas at different
times, but the years around the turn of the century saw an ac-
celerated change. "The old-fashioned term, help/ has been
dropped/' a Massachusetts farmer noticed in 1890, "and the
word labor' used with a peculiar significance." 6 Farmers took
a dim view of the new kind of agricultural labor, which was to
them simply a disciplinary problem and a factor in the cost of
production. 7 The Populists, with their belief in a single op-
pressed class of working folk in town and country, had identi-
fied themselves with all labor, agricultural or other. "Wealth
belongs to him who creates it," said their 1892 platform. "The
interests of rural and civic labor are the same; their enemies are
identical." In the nineteenth-century farmer s lexicon the word
"labor" applied to all work done by hand in city or country,
and even as late as 1860 a Wisconsin farmer who owned 240
acres and cultivated 80 himself classified himself, when inter-
viewed by the census-taker, as a "farm laborer." 8 This technical
error bespoke a psychic bond that had not yet been dissolved.
The farmer had originally thought of the city "mechanic" as a
kind of craftsman-tradesman in embryo, very much like the
farmer himself, and as the fellow victim of the aristocratic and
exploiting classes. The interest of the Knights of Labor in Popu-
lism showed that this sympathy was reciprocated. In the twenti-
eth century, when stable trade-unionism developed among
workers, and when farmers adopted more businesslike tech-

6 La Wanda F. Cox: “The American Agricultural Wage Earner, 1865-
1900,” Agricultural History , Vol. XXII (April 1948), p. 100.

7 Johnstone: “Old Ideals versus New Ideas,” pp. 147-52.

8 Joseph Schafer: The Social History of American Agriculture (New
York, 1936), pp. 199-200.

122

THE AGE OF REFORM

niques and became increasingly conscious of themselves as
employers of labor, this identification quickly disappeared . 9 De-
spite occasional local co-operation on specific issues, a sharp
tension emerged between labor and farmer groups. Farmers,
with their long hours, could not sympathize with the city work-
ers’ demand for a shorter working day; and ignoring urban liv-
ing costs, they often thought labor’s wage demands excessive.
They were encouraged by business propagandists and conserva-
tive leaders to think of labor’s wage gains chiefly as a factor
contributing to the high cost of the things they bought. And the
more powerful labor unions have become, the less has labor
commanded the farmer’s sympathy. As one student of farm
mores has put it: “Whereas a century ago the American farmer
was inclined to concentrate his suspicion of the city upon the
wealthy and aristocratic, he now tends more and more to look
upon the idleness of the unemployed and the tactics of indus-
trial unions as the most prominent symbols of urban corrup-
tion.” 1

There has been, indeed, a certain hardening of the social
sympathies among prosperous and organized farmers (and it
is only the prosperous who are organized ). 2 The Populists had

9 The development of commercial employer-employee relations in mod-
em agriculture has not put an end to attempts to portray even this aspect
of farm hfe in die light of the agrarian myth In 1939 a Congressman gave
this picture of labor relations on the farm: “The habits and customs of
agriculture of necessity have been different than those of industry. The
farmers and workers are thrown m close daily contact with one another.
They, in many cases, eat at a common table. Their children attend the
same school. Their families bow together m religious worship. They discuss
together the common problems of our economic and political life. The
farmer, his family, and the laborers work together as one unit. In the times
of stress . . . the farmer and laborer must stand shoulder to shoulder
against the common enemy. This develops a unity of interest which is not
found in industry. This unity is more effective to remove labor disturbances
than any law can be.” Harry Schwartz: Seasonal Farm Labor in the United
States (New York, 1945), p. 4.

1 Ibid., p. 152; cf. Saloutos and Hicks, op. cit., pp. 258-61.

2 See the table in McConnell, op. cit., p. 149, which shows that in all
farm organizations, including the more “radical” Farmers’ Union, member-

123

Chapter m: From Pathos to Parity

appealed in a rather touching way to the principle of universal-
ity: they were working, they liked to think, for the interests of
all toilers and certainly all farmers. In fact the diversity of inter-
ests among American farmers was such that even to them this
could hardly apply; but the Populists’ lip service to the idea was
at least a tribute to their belief in the traditions of agrarian
democracy. With the passing of Populism and with the frank
twentieth-century commercialization of American agriculture,
the tone of farmers’ movements was completely transformed.
The keynote was no longer the universality of labor or of the
farming interest, but the special crop, the special skill, the
special problem, the particular region, and above all a particular
stratum of the farming population. The modern farmers’ or-
ganizations — with the notable exception of the Farmers’ Union
— have shown no sympathy for, have often indeed shown
much hostility to, the interests of those farmers who were
dispossessed or bypassed or displaced by the processes of
prosperity . 3 Farmers on marginal land, farmers bought out
by the large-scale units and unable to relocate, farmers hand-
icapped by credit difficulties, tenancy, race discrimination, po-
litical disfranchisement, the migratory farm workers who
wander with their families from place to place and crop
to crop, making possible the cultivation of seasonal fruit and
vegetable crops with a minimum of labor costs and a mini-
mum of employer responsibility — such interests as these have
been spurned by the commercial farmers. Half the American
agricultural community, after all, has been shut out from the
characteristic material and social benefits of American life, and
to this large stratum of the population the commercial farmers

ship is dominated by farmers of high economic status ( and to a lesser de-
gree of medium status ) and that low-status farmers are a negligible part of
the membership of all such organizations.

3 The Farmers’ Union, while carrying on much the same businesslike
program as other modem farm organizations, has continued to express
Populist sentiments and support liberal measures. For an excellent summary
of its activities, see Carl C. Taylor: The Farmers' Movement , 1620-1920
(New York, 1953), chapter xiv.

124

THE AGE OF REFORM

are consistently and actively unfriendly. The most significant
organized effort to do something about this problem — the work
of the Resettlement Administration and the Farm Security Ad-
ministration — met the implacable opposition of the lobbyists
and wire-pullers of tine Farm Bureau Federation, who finally
succeeded in destroying it . 4

It was during the early years of the twentieth century that
American businessmen, disturbed by the anti-business rhetoric
of the agrarian movement and mindful of their own stake in
farm prosperity, began self-consciously to woo the farmers and
to build that rapport between the two interests which is now so
characteristic of American politics. This tendency seems to have
started on the local level, chiefly in connection with the work of
the agricultural reformer Seaman A. Knapp in popularizing
demonstration education among the farmers. It was Knapp's
aim to interest farmers in the proper techniques of cultivation
and the care of special crops and livestock. This was an area in
which most farmers were ultraconservative, and Knapp found
it necessary, in order to get a satisfactory hearing, to win the
help of local businessmen, merchants and bankers who had a
business interest in agricultural prosperity. These men practi-
cally forced farmers into co-opeiating by threatening to with-
hold credit, and in this fashion a great many technologically
reactionary husbandmen were dragooned into progressive agri-
culture. In time the railroads began to participate, arranging
with the agricultural colleges to send farm trains with educa-
tional exhibits through rural areas. The bankers also became in-
terested. The American Bankers' Association set up a Committee
on Agricultural Development and Education to establish rapport
between the farmer and the banker ( "the banker has been mis-
understood") and to assist in the work of promoting farm pros-
perity that would produce "a more contented and prosperous
people." The bankers also began to put out a public-relations
paper, the Banker-Farmer. They were followed by the producers

4 For this story see McConnell, op. cit , chapters vni, ix, x.

125

Chapter m: From Pathos to Parity

of farm equipment, through the National Implement and Vehi-
cle Association; and these in turn were followed by railroad*
industrial, and merchants’ organizations throughout the country.
The Smith-Lever Act of 1914, which made a huge national in-
stitution of demonstration education in agriculture, was passed
with the backing of a powerful business lobby. 5 American busi-
ness, while contributing to agricultural prosperity through its
support of agricultural technology and education, thus laid the
foundations of a business-agrarian alliance that has never been
broken.

Many farmers responded with enthusiasm to the attempt of
business interests and the agricultural colleges to get them to
adopt a businesslike outlook. While American business in gen-
eral was beginning to turn its attention from enlarging its physi-
cal production and building new plants to techniques of market-
ing and salesmanship, consolidation, internal management, and
the pooling of markets, a similar interest arose in agricul-
ture. In 1907 a subscriber wrote to the editor of Wallaces
Farmer: “Had you not better take up the subject of how to
market our produce, rather than to tell us all the time how to
produce more?” 6 Here lay the key to the new farm organiza-
tions, the new type of activity in the Department of Agriculture*
and indeed of the “new day” in agriculture as a whole.

Toward the close of the nineteenth century much of the writ-
ing in farm journals and the work of farm organizations con-
formed with a dominant tendency to urge the farmer to think
of himself as a businessman and to emulate the businessman in
his methods of management and marketing. Such voices had
been heard even before the Civil War on occasion; but now they
rose to a steady and effectual chorus. “The time has come,” de-
clared a Southern farm journal as early as 1887, “when the

5 McConnell, op. cit., pp. 29-33, has an excellent brief summary of
this movement in the ranks of business. On the demonstration move-
ment see Joseph C. Bailey: Seaman A. Knapp (New York, 1945), chap-
ters ix-xii.

6 Saloutos and Hicks, op. cit., p. 56.

126

THE AGE OF REFORM

farmer must be a businessman as well as an agriculturist. . . .
He will have to keep farm accounts, know how much he spends,
what his crops cost him, and how much the profit foots up”; and
another writer in an article entitled “The Farmer as a Merchant”
echoed: “ . . the one who sells best will have the best success.
. . . Watch and study the markets, and the ways of marketmen,
and dealers in all kinds of goods, and learn the art of ‘selling
well.’ ” 7 “Now the object of farming,” declared a writer in the
Cornell Countryman in 1904, “is not primarily to make a living,
but it is to make money. To this end it is to be conducted on the
same business basis as any other producing industry,” and the
same journal announced that the Farmers’ Institute meeting
held at the agricultural college was “a business meeting for
businessmen.” 8

Leaders of the new farmers’ organizations no longer spoke of
the humble and exploited yeoman, but urged farmers to act like
captains of industry, restrict production, withhold surpluses,
control markets, and put farming, as the leader of the American
Society of Equity expressed it, “on a safe profitable basis,” with
benefits “equalling those realized in other business undertak-
ings.” 9 In 1919 the largest and most powerful of the farm or-
ganizations, the Farm Bureau Federation, was founded. This
organization has expressed from the beginning the outlook of
the most conservative and prosperous farmers and has been
built upon quasi-official relations with the Department of Agri-
culture through its nationwide liaison with the Department’s
county agents. At the time of its founding, Henry C. Wallace,
editor of Wallace’s Farmer and later Secretary of Agriculture
under Harding, delivered an influential address in which he
urged: “This federation must get to work at once on a real busi-
ness program if it is to justify its existence. That doesn’t mean

7 Johnstone, op. cit., pp. 143, 145.

8 Ibid., p. 145. Cf. Eventt, op. cit., p. 42: “What the farmer wants to
produce is not crops, but money.”

9 Saloutos and Hicks, op. cit., p. 114; cf. pp. 113-15.

127

Chapter hi: From Pathos to Parity

turning the work over to committees of farmers , either. Every
line of work must be in charge of experts. The best qualified
men in the United States should be hired to manage each of
the various lines of work. This federation must not degenerate
into an educational or social institution. It must be made the
most powerful business institution in the country ." 1 Like other
businessmen, the members of the Federation were expected to
hire experts; they have retained expensive leaders and able lob-
byists at fat salaries, and have admitted into membership and
influence men who are not farmers and whose primary interests
he outside farming . 2

What has been true of the prosperous farmers economic role
has also been true of his social life, though the transition here
has been perhaps less complete and less spectacular. I remarked
earlier that the farmer of the nineteenth century, except in
limited areas, had been deprived of the advantages of a folk
culture and a folk community. The consequent physical, social,
and cultural isolation was intensely felt by the farmers, and
perhaps even more by their wives; it was one of the gaps in
farm life that such organizations as the Grange, the Alliance,
and the Chautauquas tried to fill . 3 The social changes of the
twentieth century have gone far to wipe out some of the cultural
differences between the well-to-do farmer and urban groups of
comparable income. While the early farmer was deprived of the

1 Orville M. Kile: The Farm Bureau Movement (New York, 1921),
p. 123.

2 Saloutos and Hicks, op. cit., p. 273; for an account of the chief farm
organizations, see DeWitt C. Wing: “Trends m National Farm Organiza-
tions,” Farmers in a Changing World , pp. 941-79. Leaders of farm co-
operatives, it should be added, are not so well paid as the outstanding
national lobbyists.

3 It is noteworthy that the Chautauqua movement, which was a rural
institution, and which had flourished since the 1880’s, went rapidly to
pieces m the mid-1920’s when the farmer’s isolation became a thing of the
past See Victoria Case and Robert Ormond Case. We Called It Culture
(New York, 1948), and Henry F Pringle. “Chautauqua in the Jazz Age,”
American Mercury , Vol. XVI (January 1929), pp. 85-93.

12S

THE AGE OF REFORM

satisfactions of a genuine folk culture, his modern successor has
had liberal access to modern popular culture. In rapid succes-
sion, rural free delivery, mail-order catalogues, improved roads,
automobiles and trucks, rural electrification, the telephone and
radio, and the movies have introduced him to the same enter-
tainments as middle-class city people. The old stereotype of the
farmer as the hayseed has become less meaningful, and much
less acceptable to the farmer himself. In 1921 a journal for
prosperous farmers ran a series of cartoons and comments by
nationally known cartoonists on the theme: “What the Farmer
Really Looks Like,” in which they generally agreed that the old
cartoon figure of the lean, bewhiskered rustic with a battered
straw hat was no longer accurate, and that the farmer looked
just as much like a businessman as anyone else. 4

With these changes there has developed in the American
countryside a disparity in living standards and outlook between
the most affluent and the least privileged that almost matches
anything the city has to show. While marginal farmers and
migratory laborers live in desperate poverty and squalor, suc-
cessful agriculturists have been able to respond to the canons
of conspicuous consumption and the American love for luxurious
gadgetry. Automobile manufacturers, advertising in farm jour-
nals, can describe their product as “a regally luxurious motor
car . . . beautifully engineered, beautifully built — and stylish
as the Rue de la Paix,” and a farm reporter can say of a Farm
Bureau Federation convention that “to watch ... its milling
thousands of farmers and their wives, prosperous-looking and

4 The series was started by Freeman Tildens article: “What a Farmer
Really Looks Like,” Country Gentleman , Vol. LXXXVI (July 2, 1921),

E p. 6-7, and was followed by cartoons m the subsequent issues to Decem-
er 17, 1921. Students of Americana can find in these cartoons an interest-
ing case m which the makers of stereotypes quite deliberately and self-
consciously lay one of their creations to rest. The willingness of the
cartoonists to abandon the old stereotype was not matched by their ability
to arrive at a new one. Their written comments made it clear that one
ancient notion was still widely shared: that the farmer is, in effect, the
moral center of the umverse.

129

Chapter hi. From Pathos to Parity

often stylish, is often more like viewing a giant world fair or
other amusement center.” 5 6

This seems a far cry from the atmosphere of the nineties, and
still farther from the old picture of the yeoman. What it means
for rural attitudes in the sphere of consumption may be illus-
trated by two quotations. In 1860 when Mary E. Lease, the
future Kansas orator, was a little girl, a farm journal had sati-
rized the imagined refinements and affectations of a city girl in
the following picture: "Slowly [she] rises from her couch, the
while yawning, for being compelled to rise so horrid early.
Languidly she gains her feet, and oh! what vision of human
perfection appears before us: Skinny, bony, sickly, hipless,
thighless, formless, hairless, teethless. What a radiant belle!
. . . The ceremony of enrobing commences. In goes the den-
tist’s naturalization efforts; next the witching curls are fashioned
to her ‘classically molded head/ Then the womanly proportions
are properly adjusted; hoops, bustles, and so forth, follow in
succession, then a profuse quantity of whitewash, together with
a ‘permanent rose tint 5 is applied to a sallow complexion; and
lastly the ‘killing 5 wrapper is arranged on her systematical and
matchless form.” Compare with this the following beauty hints
for farmers 5 wives from the Idaho Farmer , April 1935: "Hands
should be soft enough to flatter the most delicate of the new
fabrics. They must be carefully manicured, with none of the
hot, brilliant shades of nail polish. The lighter and more delicate
tones are in keeping with the spirit of freshness. Keep the tint
of your fingertips friendly to the red of your lips, and check
both your powder and your rouge to see that they best suit the
tone of your skin in the bold light of summer/ 5 6

While such advertisements do not tell us how many, even
among prosperous farmers 5 wives, found time to toy with light
and delicate tones of nail polish, neither the advertiser, the jour-

5 Johnstone, op. cit, p. 162; William M. Blair m New York Times , De-
cember 16, 1951.

6 For both quotations, Johnstone, op. cit., pp. 134, 162.

130

THE AGE OF REFORM

nal, nor, we may assume, most farmers 5 wives found it ludicrous
that these things should be treated in a farm magazine. The very
presence of such an ideal is significant. Would Mary Lease, who
was accustomed to address weary audiences of farm women in
faded calico dresses, turn over in her grave at the suggestion of
these rosy-tinted fingertips? I am not sure. What she wanted to
win for the farmers and their families was more of the good
things of life — the American standard of living as it was known
in her day. Standards have changed; and it is hard to say exactly
where the embattled farmers would have chosen to stop. The
dialectic of history is full of odd and cunningly contrived ironies,
and among these are rebellions waged only that the rebels might
in the end be converted into their opposites.

((( 131 )))

CHAPTER IV

THE STATUS REVOLUTION
AND PROGRESSIVE LEADERS

i. The Plutocracy and the Mugwump Type

P

!L opulism had been overwhelmingly rural and provincial. The
ferment of the Progressive era was urban, middle-class, and
nationwide. Above all, Progressivism differed from Populism in
the fact that the middle classes of the cities not only joined the
trend toward protest but took over its leadership. While Bryan’s
old followers still kept their interest in certain reforms, they now
found themselves in the company of large numbers who had
hitherto violently opposed them. As the demand for reform
spread from the farmers to the middle class and from the Popu-
list Party into the major parties, it became more powerful and
more highly regarded. It had been possible for their enemies to
brand the Populists as wild anarchists, especially since there
were millions of Americans who had never laid eyes on either a
Populist or an anarchist. But it was impossible to popularize
such a distorted image of the Progressives, who flourished in
every section of the country, everywhere visibly, palpably, al-
most pathetically respectable.

William Allen White recalled in his Autobiography , perhaps
with some exaggeration, the atmosphere of the Greenback and
Populist conventions he had seen, first as a boy, then as a young
reporter. As a solid middle-class citizen of the Middle West, he
had concluded that "those agrarian movements too often ap-

132

THE AGE OF REFORM

pealed to the ne’er-do-wells, the misfits — farmers who had
failed, lawyers and doctors who were not orthodox, teachers
who could not make the grade, and neurotics full of hates and
ebullient, evanescent enthusiasms.” Years later, when he sur-
veyed the membership of the Bull Moose movement of 1912, he
found it "fin the main and in its heart of hearts petit bourgeois”:
“a movement of little businessmen, professional men, well-to-do
farmers, skilled artisans from the upper brackets of organized
labor . . . the successful middle-class country-town citizens,
the farmer whose barn was painted, the well-paid railroad engi-
neer, and the country editor.” 1

White saw himself as a case in point. In the nineties he had
been, in his own words, “a child of the governing classes,” and
“a stouthearted young reactionary,” who rallied with other young
Kansas Republicans against the Populists and won a national
reputation with his fierce anti-Populist diatribe: “What's the
Matter with Kansas?” In the Progressive era he became one of
the outstanding publicists of reform, a friend and associate of
the famous muckrakers, and an enthusiastic Bull Mooser. His
change of heart was also experienced by a large portion of that
comfortable society of which he was a typical and honored
spokesman, a society that had branded the Populists and Bryan
as madmen and then appropriated so much of the Populist pro-
gram, as White said of its political leaders, that they “caught the
Populists in swimming and stole all of their clothing except the
frayed underdrawers of free silver.” 2

Clearly, the need for political and economic reform was now
felt more widely in the country at large. Another, more obscure
process, traceable to the flexibility and opportunism of the
American party system, was also at work: successful resistance
to reform demands required a partial incorporation of the re-
form program. As Bryan Democracy had taken over much of
the spirit and some of the program of Populism, Theodore

1 Autobiography , pp. 482-3.

2 Quoted by Kenneth Hechler: Insurgency (New York, 1940), pp. 21-2.

Chapter iv: The Status Revolution and Progressive Leaders 133

Roosevelt, in turn, persistently blunted Bryans appeal by ap-
propriating Bryan s issues in modified form. In this way Progres-
sivism became nationwide and bipartisan, encompassing Demo-
crats and Republicans, country and city, East, West, and South.
A working coalition was forged between the old Bryan country
and the new reform movement in the cities, without which the
broad diffusion and strength of Progressivism would have been
impossible. Its spirit spread so widely that by the time of the
three-cornered presidential contest of 1912 President Taft, who
was put in the position of the “conservative” candidate, got less
than half the combined popular vote of the “Progressives,” Wil-
son and Roosevelt.

After 1900 Populism and Progressivism merge, though a close
student may find in the Progressive era two broad strains of
thought, one influenced chiefly by the Populist inheritance, the
other mainly a product of urban life. Certainly Progressivism
was characterized by a fresh, more intimate and sympathetic
concern with urban problems — labor and social welfare, munici-
pal reform, the interest of the consumer. However, those
achievements of the age that had a nationwide import and re-
quired Congressional action, such as tariff and financial legis-
lation, railroad and trust regulation, and the like, were depend-
ent upon the votes of the Senators from the agrarian regions and
were shaped in such a way as would meet their demands.

While too sharp a distinction between Populist and Progres-
sive thinking would distort reality, the growth of middle-class
reform sentiment, the contributions of professionals and edu-
cated men, made Progressive thought more informed, more
moderate, more complex than Populist thought had been. Pro-
gressivism, moreover, as the product of a more prosperous era,
was less rancorous. With the exception of a few internally con-
troversial issues of a highly pragmatic sort, the Populists had
tended to be of one mind on most broad social issues, and that
mind was rather narrow and predictable. The Progressives were
more likely to be aware of the complexities of social issues and

134

THE AGE OF REFORM

more divided among themselves. Indeed, the characteristic Pro-
gressive was often of two minds on many issues. Concerning the
great corporations, the Progressives felt that they were a menace
to society and that they were all too often manipulated by un-
scrupulous men; on the other hand, many Progressives were quite
aware that the newer organization of industry and finance was
a product of social evolution which had its beneficent side and
that it was here to stay. Concerning immigrants, they frequently
shared Populist prejudices and the Populist horror of ethnic
mixture, but they were somewhat more disposed to discipline
their feelings with a sense of some obligation to the immigrant
and the recognition that his Americanization was a practical
problem that must be met with a humane and constructive pro-
gram. As for labor, while they felt, perhaps more acutely than
most Populists of the nineties, that the growth of union power
posed a distinct problem, even a threat, to them, they also saw
that labor organization had arisen in response to a real need
among the urban masses that must in some way be satisfied. As
for the bosses, the machines, the corruptions of city life, they too
found in these things grave evils; but they were ready, perhaps
all too ready, to admit that the existence of such evils was in
large measure their own fault. Like the Populists the Progres-
sives were full of indignation, but their indignation was more
qualified by a sense of responsibility, often even of guilt, and it
was supported by a greater capacity to organize, legislate, and
administer. But lest all this seem unfair to the Populists, it
should be added that the Progressives did not, as a rule, have
the daring or the originative force of the Populists of the 1890’s,
and that a great deal of Progressive political effort was spent
enacting proposals that the Populists had outlined fifteen or
even twenty years earlier.

Curiously, the Progressive revolt — even when we have made
allowance for the brief panic of 1907 and the downward turn
in business in 1913 — took place almost entirely during a period

Chapter iv: The Status Revolution and Progressive Leaders 135

of sustained and general prosperity. The middle class, most of
which had been content to accept the conservative leadership
of Hanna and McKinley during the period of crisis in the mid-
nineties, rallied to the support of Progressive leaders in both
parties during the period of well-being that followed. This fact
is a challenge to the historian. Why did the middle classes un-
dergo this remarkable awakening at all, and why during this
period of general prosperity in which most of them seem to have
shared? What was the place of economic discontents in the
Progressive movement? To what extent did reform originate in
other considerations?

Of course Progressivism had the adherence of a heterogeneous
public whose various segments responded to various needs. But
I am concerned here with a large and strategic section of Pro-
gressive leadership, upon whose contributions the movement
was politically and intellectually as well as financially dependent,
and whose members did much to formulate its ideals. It is my
thesis that men of this sort, who might be designated broadly as
the Mugwump type, were Progressives not because of economic
deprivations but primarily because they were victims of an up-
heaval in status that took place in the United States during the
closing decades of the nineteenth and the early years of the
twentieth century. Progressivism, in short, was to a very con-
siderable extent led by men who suffered from the events of
their time not through a shrinkage in their means but through
the changed pattern in the distribution of deference and power.

Up to about 1870 the United States was a nation with a rather
broad diffusion of wealth, status, and power, in which the man
of moderate means, especially in the many small communities,
could command much deference and exert much influence. The
small merchant or manufacturer, the distinguished lawyer, edi-
tor, or preacher, was a person of local eminence in an age in
which local eminence mattered a great deal. In the absence of
very many nationwide sources of power and prestige, the pillars
of the local communities were men of great importance in their

136

THE AGE OF REFORM

own right. What Henry Adams remembered about his own
bailiwick was, on the whole, true of the country at large: “Down
to 1850, and even later, New England society was still directed
by the professions. Lawyers, physicians, professors, merchants
were classes, and acted not as individuals, but as though they
were clergymen and each profession were a church/' 3

In the post-Civil War period all this was changed. The rapid
development of the big cities, the building of a great industrial
plant, the construction of the railroads, the emergence of the
corporation as the dominant form of enterprise, transformed the
old society and revolutionized the distribution of power and
prestige. During the 1840's there were not twenty millionaires
in the entire country; by 1910 there were probably more than
twenty millionaires sitting in the United States Senate. 4 5 By the
late 1880’s this process had gone far enough to become the sub-
ject of frequent, anxious comment in the press. In 1891 the
Forum published a much-discussed article on “The Coming
Billionaire,” by Thomas G. Shearman, who estimated that there
were 120 men in the United States each of whom was worth
over ten million dollars. 6 In 1892 the New York Tribune , inspired
by growing popular criticism of the wealthy, published a list of
4,047 reputed millionaires, and in the following year a statis-
tician of the Census Bureau published a study of the concen-
tration of wealth in which he estimated that 9 per cent of the
families of the nation owned 71 per cent of the wealth. 6

3 The Education of Henry Adams (New York, Modem Library ed.,
1931), p. 32, cf. Tocqueville: Democracy in America (New York, 1912),
Vol. I, pp. 40-1.

4 Sidney Ratner: American Taxation (New York, 1942), pp 136, 275.

5 Thomas G. Shearman: “The Coming Billionaire,” Forum , Vol. X (Jan-
uary 1891), pp. 546-57; cf. the same author's “The Owners of the United
States,” ibid., Vol. VIII (November 1889), pp. 262—73.

6 Ratner, op. cit., p. 220 Sidney Ratner has published the Tribune’s
hst and one compiled m 1902 by the New York World Almanac , together
with a valuable introductory essay m his New Light on the History of
Great American Fortunes (New York, 1953). The Tribune’s list was com-
piled chiefly to prove to the critics of the tariff that an overwhelming ma-
jority of the great fortunes had been made in businesses that were not

Chapter iv: The Status Revolution and Progressive Leaders 137

The newly rich, the grandiosely or corruptly rich, the masters
of great corporations, were bypassing the men of the Mugwump
type — the old gentry, the merchants of long standing, the small
manufacturers, the established professional men, the civic lead-
ers of an earlier era. In a score of cities and hundreds of towns,
particularly in the East but also in the nation at large, the old-
family, college-educated class that had deep ancestral roots in
local communities and often owned family businesses, that had
traditions of political leadership, belonged to the patriotic socie-
ties and the best clubs, staffed the governing boards of philan-
thropic and cultural institutions, and led the movements for
civic betterment, were being overshadowed and edged aside in
the making of basic political and economic decisions. In their
personal careers, as in their community activities, they found
themselves checked, hampered, and overridden by the agents of
the new corporations, the corrupters of legislatures, the buyers
of franchises, the allies of the political bosses. In this uneven
struggle they found themselves limited by their own scruples,
their regard for reputation, their social standing itself. To be
sure, the America they knew did not lack opportunities, but it
did seem to lack opportunities of the highest sort for men of the
highest standards. In a strictly economic sense these men were
not growing poorer as a class, but their wealth and power were
being dwarfed by comparison with the new eminences of wealth
and power. They were less important, and they knew it.

Against the tide of new wealth the less affluent and aristo-
cratic local gentry had almost no protection at all. The richer
and better-established among them found it still possible, of
course, to trade on their inherited money and position, and their

beneficiaries of tariff protection. For an analysis of the Tribunes list, see
G. P. Watkins: “The Growth of Large Fortunes,” Publications of the
American Economic Association , third series, Vol. VIII (1907), pp. 141-7.
Out of the alarm of the penod over the concentration of wealth arose the
first American studies of national wealth and income. For a review of these
studies, see C. L. Merwm: “American Studies of the Distribution of
Wealth and Income by Size,” m Studies in Income and Wealth , Vol. Ill
(New York, 1939), pp. 3-84.

138

THE AGE OF REFORM

presence as window-dressing was an asset for any kind of enter-
prise, in business or elsewhere, to which they would lend their
sponsorship. Often indeed the new men sought to marry into
their circles, or to buy from them social position much as they
bought from the bosses legislation and franchises. But at best
the gentry could only make a static defense of themselves, hold-
ing their own in absolute terms while relatively losing ground
year by year. Even this much they could do only in the localities
over which they had long presided and in which they were well
known. And when everyone could see that the arena of prestige,
like the market for commodities, had been widened to embrace
the entire nation, eminence in mere localities ceased to be as
important and satisfying as once it had been. To face the inso-
lence of the local boss or traction magnate in a town where one’s
family had long been prominent was galling enough ; 7 it was
still harder to bear at a time when every fortune, every career,
every reputation, seemed smaller and less significant because it
was measured against the Vanderbilts, Harrimans, Goulds, Car-
negies, Rockefellers, and Morgans . 8

7 In the West and South it was more often the absentee railroad or in-
dustrial corporation that was resented In more recent times, such local re-
sentments have frequently taken a more harmful and less constructive form
than the similar resentments of the Progressive era. Seymour M Lipset
and Remhard Bendix have pointed out that in small American cities de-
pendent for their livelihood upon large national corporations, the local
upper classes, who are upper class only m their own community, resent
their economic weakness and their loss of power to the outsiders. “The
small industrialist and business man of the nation is caught in a struggle
between big unionism and big industry, and he feels threatened. This ex-
perience of the discrepancy between local prominence and the decline of
local economic power provides a fertile ground for an ideology which at-
tacks both big business and big unionism.” “Social Status and Social Struc-
ture,” British Journal of Sociology , Vol II (June 1951), p. 233.

s It may be significant that the era of the status revolution was also one
in which great numbers of patriotic societies were founded. Of 105 patri-
otic orders founded between 1783 and 1900, 34 originated before 1870
and 71 between 1870 and 1900. A high proportion of American patriotic
societies is based upon descent and length of family residence in the
Umted States, often specifically requiring family participation m some
such national event as the American Revolution. The increase of patriotic
and genealogical societies durmg the status revolution suggests that many

Chapter iv: The Status Revolution and Progressive Leaders 139

The first reaction of the Mugwump type to the conditions of
the status revolution was quite different from that later to be
displayed by their successors among the Progressives. All
through the seventies, eighties, and nineties men from the upper
ranks of business and professional life had expressed their dis-
taste for machine politics, corruption, and the cruder forms of
business intervention in political affairs. Such men were com-
monly Republicans, but independent enough to bolt if they felt
their principles betrayed. They made their first organized ap-
pearance in the ill-fated Liberal Republican movement of 1872,
but their most important moment came in 1884, when their bolt
from the Republican Party after the nomination of James G.
Blaine was widely believed to have helped tip the scales to
Cleveland in a close election.

While men of the Mugwump type flourished during those
decades most conspicuously about Boston, a center of seasoned
wealth and seasoned conscience, where some of the most note-
worthy names in Massachusetts were among them, 9 they were
also prominent in a metropolis like New York and could be
found in some strength in such Midwestern cities as Indianapolis
and Chicago. None the less, one senses among them the promi-
nence of the cultural ideals and traditions of New England, and
beyond these of old England. Protestant and Anglo-Saxon for
the most part, they were very frequently of New England an-
cestry; and even when they were not, they tended to look to

old-family Americans, who were losmg status in the present, may have
found satisfying compensation m turning to family glories of the past. Of
course, a large proportion of these orders were founded during the national-
istic outbursts of the nineties, but these too may have had their subtle psy-
chological relation to status changes. Note the disdain of men hke Theodore
Roosevelt for the lack of patriotism and aggressive nationalism among men
of great wealth. On the founding of patriotic societies, see Wallace E.
Davies: A History of American Veterans' and Hereditary Patriotic Socie-
ties , 1783-1900 , unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University,
1944, Vol. II, pp. 441 ff.

9 Notably Charles Francis Adams, Jr., Edward Atkinson, Moorfield
Storey, Leverett Saltonstall, William Everett, Josiah Qumcy, Thomas
Wentworth Higginson.

140

THE AGE OF REFORM

New England’s history for literary, cultural, and political models
and for examples of moral idealism. Their conception of state-
craft was set by the high example of the Founding Fathers, or
by the great debating statesmen of the silver age, Webster,
Sumner, Everett, Clay, and Calhoun. Their ideal leader was a
well-to-do, well-educated, high-minded citizen, rich enough to
be free from motives of what they often called “crass material-
ism,” whose family roots were deep not only in American history
but in his local community. Such a person, they thought, would
be just the sort to put the national interest, as well as the inter-
ests of civic improvement, above personal motives or political
opportunism. And such a person was just the sort, as Henry
Adams never grew tired of complaining, for whom American
political life was least likely to find a place. To be sure, men of
the Mugwump type could and did find places in big industry, in
the great corporations, and they were sought out to add re-
spectability to many forms of enterprise. But they tended to
have positions in which the initiative was not their own, or in
which they could not feel themselves acting in harmony with
their highest ideals. They no longer called the tune, no longer
commanded their old deference. They were expropriated, not so
much economically as morally.

They imagined themselves to have been ousted almost en-
tirely by new men of the crudest sort. While in truth the great
business leaders of the Gilded Age were typically men who
started from comfortable or privileged beginnings in life , 1 the
Mugwump mind was most concerned with the newness and the
rawness of the corporate magnates, and Mugwumps and re-

1 See William Miller; “American Historians and the Business Elite,”
Journal of Economic History , Vol. IX (November 1949), pp. 184-208;
“The Recruitment of the American Busmess Elite,” Quarteny Journal of
Economics , Vol. LXIV (May 1950), pp. 242-53. C. Wright Mills: “The
American Busmess Ehte; a Collective Portrait,” Journal of Economic His-
tory , Vol. V (Supplemental issue, 1945), pp. 20-44. Frances W. Gregory
and Irene D. Neu: “The American Industrial Ehte m the 1870’s,” in Wil-
liam Miller, ed.: Men in Business (Cambridge, 1952), pp. 193-211.

Chapter iv: The Status Revolution and Progressive Leaders 141

formers alike found satisfaction in a bitter caricature of the great
businessman. One need only turn to the social novels of the
* realists” who wrote about businessmen at the turn of the cen-
tury — William Dean Howells, H. H. Boyesen, Henry Blake
Fuller, and Robert Herrick, among others — to see the portrait
of the captain of industry that dominated the Mugwump imagi-
nation. The industrialists were held to be uneducated and un-
cultivated, irresponsible, rootless and corrupt, devoid of refine-
ment or of any sense of noblesse. “If our civilization is destroyed,
as Macaulay predicted,” wrote Henry Demarest Lloyd in an as-
sessment of the robber barons, “it will not be by his barbarians
from below. Our barbarians come from above. Our great money-
makers have sprung in one generation into seats of power kings
do not know. The forces and the wealth are new , and have been
the opportunity of new' men . Without restraints of culture , ex-
perience , the pride , or even the inherited caution of class or
rank , these men, intoxicated, think they are the wave instead
of the float, and that they have created the business which has
created them. To them science is but a never-ending repertoire
of investments stored up by nature for the syndicates, govern-
ment but a fountain of franchises, the nations but customers in
squads, and a million the unit of a new arithmetic of wealth
written for them. They claim a power without control, exercised
through forms which make it secret, anonymous, and perpetual.
The possibilities of its gratification have been widening before
them without interruption since they began, and even at a
thousand millions they will feel no satiation and will see no
place to stop.” 2

Unlike Lloyd, however, the typical Mugwump was a con-
servative in his economic and political views. He disdained, to

2 Henry Demarest Lloyd: Wealth against Commonwealth (New York,
1894, ed. 1899), pp. 510-11, italics added. For some characteristic ex-
pressions on the plutocracy by other writers, see the lengthy quotations in
Lloyd’s article “Plutocracy,” m W. D P Bliss, ed.: Encyclopedia of Social
Reform (New York, 1897), pp. 1012-16.

142

THE AGE OF REFORM

be sure, the most unscrupulous of the new men of wealth, as he
did the opportunistic, boodling, tariff-mongering politicians who
served them. But the most serious abuses of the unfolding eco-
nomic order of the Gilded Age he either resolutely ignored or
accepted complacently as an inevitable result of the struggle for
existence or the improvidence and laziness of thg masses . 3 As a
rule, he was dogmatically committed to the prevailing theoreti-
cal economics of laissez faire. His economic program did not go
much beyond tariff reform and sound money — both principles
more easily acceptable to a group whose wealth was based more
upon mercantile activities and the professions than upon manu-
facturing and new enterprises — and his political program rested
upon the foundations of honest and efficient government and
civil-service reform. He was a “liberal” in the classic sense. Tar-
iff reform, he thought, would be the sovereign remedy for the
huge business combinations that were arising. His pre-eminent
journalist and philosopher was E. L. Godkin, the honorable old
free-trading editor of the Nation and the New York Evening
Tost. His favorite statesman was Grover Cleveland, who de-
scribed the tariff as the “mother of trusts.” He imagined that
most of the economic ills that were remediable at all could be
remedied by free trade, just as he believed that the essence of
government lay in honest dealing by honest and competent men.

Lord Bryce spoke of the Mugwump movement as being
“made more important by the intelligence and social position
of the men who composed it than by its voting power .” 4 It
was in fact intellect and social position, among other things,
that insulated the Mugwump from the sources of voting power.
If he was critical of the predatory capitalists and their political
allies, he was even more contemptuously opposed to the “radi-

8 For a cross-section of the views of this school, see Alan P. Grimes:
The Political Liberalism of the New York nation, 1865-1932 (Chapel
Hill, 1953), chapter il.

4 The American Commonwealth , Vol. II, p. 45, see pp 45-50 for a brief
characterization of the Mugwump type.

Chapter iv: The Status Revolution and Progressive Leaders 143

cal” agrarian movements and the "demagogues” who led them,
to the city workers when, led by "walking delegates,” they re-
belled against their employers, and to the urban immigrants and
the "unscrupulous bosses” who introduced them to the mysteries
o£ American civic life. He was an impeccable constitutionalist,
but the fortunes of American politics had made him an equally
firm aristocrat. He had his doubts, now that the returns were in,
about the beneficence of universal suffrage. 5 The last thing he
would have dreamed of was to appeal to the masses against the
plutocracy, and to appeal to them against the local bosses
was usually fruitless. The Mugwump was shut off from the peo-
ple as much by his social reserve and his amateurism as by his
candidly conservative views. In so far as he sought popular sup-
port, he sought it on aristocratic terms.

One of the changes that made Progressivism possible around
the turn of the century was the end of this insulation of the
Mugwump type from mass support. For reasons that it is in
good part the task of these pages to explore, the old barriers
melted away. How the Mugwump found a following is a com-
plex story, but it must be said at once that this was impossible
until the Mugwump type itself had been somewhat transformed.
The sons and successors of the Mugwumps had to challenge
their fathers’ ideas, modify their doctrinaire commitment to
laissez faire , replace their aristocratic preferences with a star-
tling revival of enthusiasm for popular government, and develop
greater flexibility in dealing with the demands of the discon-
tented before they could launch the movement that came to
dominate the political life of the Progressive era.

But if the philosophy and the spirit were new, the social type
and the social grievance were much the same. The Mugwump
had broadened his base. One need not be surprised, for instance,
to find among the Progressive leaders in both major parties a
large number of well-to-do men whose personal situation is
5 Gnmes, op. cit., chapter id.

144

THE AGE OF REFORM

reminiscent of the Mugwumps of an earlier generation. As Pro-
fessor George Mowry has remarked, “few reform movements in
American history have had the support of more wealthy men.” 6
Such men as George W. Perkins and Frank Munsey, who may
perhaps be accused of joining the Progressive movement pri-
marily to blunt its edge, can be left out of account, and such
wealthy reformers as Charles R. Crane, Rudolph Spreckels,
E. A. Filene, the Pinchots, and William Kent may be dismissed
as exceptional. Still, in examining the lives and backgrounds of
the reformers of the era, one is impressed by the number of
those who had considerably more than moderate means, and
particularly by those who had inherited their money. As yet no
study has been made of reform leaders in both major parties,
but the systematic information available on leaders of the Pro-
gressive Party of 1912 is suggestive. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.,
surveying the backgrounds and careers of 260 Progressive Party
leaders throughout the country, has noted how overwhelmingly
urban and middle-class they were. Almost entirely native-born
Protestants, they had an extraordinarily high representation of
professional men and college graduates. The rest were business-
men, proprietors of fairly large enterprises. None was a farmer,
only one was a labor-union leader, and the white-collar classes
and salaried managers of large industrial or transportation en-
terprises were completely unrepresented. Not surprisingly, the
chief previous political experience of most of them was in local
politics. But on the whole, as Chandler observes, they “had had
little experience with any kind of institutional discipline. In this
sense, though they lived in the city, they were in no way typical
men of the city. With very rare exceptions, all these men had
been and continued to be their own bosses. As lawyers, busi-
nessmen, and professional men, they worked for themselves and
had done so for most of their lives. As individualists, unac-
quainted with institutional discipline or control, the Progressive

6 George Mowry: Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Movement
(Madison, 1946), p. 10.

Chapter iv: The Status Revolution and Progressive Leaders 145

leaders represented, in spite of their thoroughly urban back-
grounds, the ideas of the older, more rural America” 7 8 From the
only other comparable study, George Mowry’s survey of the
California Progressives, substantially the same conclusions
emerge. The average California Progressive was "in the jargon
of his day, well fixed/ He was more often than not a Mason, and
almost invariably a member of his town’s chamber of commerce.
... He apparently had been, at least until 1900, a conservative

Republican, satisfied with McKinley and his Republican prede-

» 8

cessors.

While some of the wealthier reformers were self-made men,
like John P. Altgeld, Hazen Pingree, the Mayor of Detroit and
Governor of Michigan, and Samuel ("Golden Rule”) Jones, the
crusading Mayor of Toledo, more were men of the second and
third generation of wealth or (notably Tom Johnson and Joseph
Fels ) men who had been declassed for a time and had recouped
their fortunes. Progressive ideology, at any rate, distinguished
consistently between 4 responsible” and “irresponsible” wealth

7 Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. : “The Origins of Progressive Leadership,” m
Eltmg Morison, ed.: The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt , Vol. VIII (Cam-
bridge, 1954), pp. 1462-5. Chandler found the 260 leaders distributed as
follows: business, 95; lawyers, 75; editors, 36; other professional (college
professors, authors, social workers, and a scattering of others), 55. Chan-
dler also found significant regional variations In the cities of the Northeast
and the old Northwest, the role of the intellectuals and professionals was
large, while the businessmen were chiefly those who managed old, estab-
lished enterprises. In the South, however, a rising social elite of aggressive
new businessmen took part. In the West and the rural areas, editors and
lawyers dominated party leadership, while the businessmen tended to be
from businesses of modest size, like cattle, real estate, lumber, publishing,
small manufacturing.

8 George Mowiy: The California Progressives (Berkeley, 1951), pp.
88-9; see generally chapter iv, which contains an illuminating brief ac-
count of 47 Progressive leaders. Three fourths of these were college-
educated. There were 17 lawyers, 14 journalists, 11 independent business-
men and real-estate operators, 3 doctors, 3 bankers. Of the ideology of this
group Mowry observed that they were opposed chiefly to “the impersonal,
concentrated, and supposedly privileged property represented by the be-
hemoth corporation. Looking backward to an older America [they] sought
to recapture and reaffirm the older individualistic values m all the strata of
political, economic, and social life.” Ibid , p. 89.

146

THE AGE OF REFORM

—a distinction that seems intimately related to the antagonism
of those who had had money long enough to make temperate
and judicious use of it for those who were rioting with new-
found means.

A gifted contemporary of the Progressives, Walter Weyl, ob-
served in his penetrating and now all but forgotten book The
New Democracy that this distinction between types of wealth
could often be seen in American cities: “As wealth accumulates,
moreover, a cleavage of sentiment widens between the men who
are getting rich and the men who are rich. The old Cincinnati
distinction between the tf stick- 5 ems 5 (the actual pork-packers)
and the rich ‘stuck-’ems 5 is today reflected in the difference be-
tween the retired millionaires of New York and the millionaires,
in process or hope, of Cleveland, Portland, Los Angeles, or
Denver. The gilt-edged millionaire bondholder of a standard
railroad has only a partial sympathy with timber thieves, though
his own fortune may have originated a few generations ago in
railroad-wrecking or the slave and Jamaica rum trade; while
the cultured descendants of cotton manufacturers resent the
advent into their society of the man who had made his pile’ in
the recent buying or selling of franchises. Once wealth is sancti-
fied by hoary age ... it tends to turn quite naturally against
new and evil ways of wealth getting, the expedients of prospec-
tive social climbers. The old wealth is not a loyal ally in the
battle for the plutocracy; it inclines, if not to democratic, at
least to mildly reformatory, programs . . . the battle between
the plutocracy and the democracy, which furiously wages in the
cities where wealth is being actually fought for, becomes some-
what gentler in those cities where bodies of accumulated wealth
exercise a moderating influence. Inheritance works in the same
direction. Once wealth is separated from its original accumula-
tor, it slackens its advocacy of its method of accumulation / 5 9

Weyl realized, moreover, that so far as a great part of the

9 Walter Weyl. The New Democracy (New York, 1914), pp. 242-3.

Chapter iv: The Status Revolution and Progressive Leaders 147

dissenting public was concerned, the central grievance against
the American plutocracy was not that it despoiled them eco-
nomically but that it overshadowed them, that in the still com-
petitive arena of prestige derived from conspicuous consump-
tion and the style of life, the new plutocracy had set standards
of such extravagance and such notoriety that everyone else felt
humbled by comparison. Not only was this true of the nation as
a whole in respect to the plutocracy, but there was an inner
plutocracy in every community and every profession that
aroused the same vague resentment: “The most curious factor/'
he found, in the almost universal American antagonism toward
the plutocracy, was “that an increasing bitterness is felt by a
majority which is not worse but better off than before. This
majority suffers not an absolute decline but a relatively slower
growth. It objects that the plutocracy grows too fast; that in
growing so rapidly it squeezes its growing neighbors. Growth
is right and proper, but there is, it is alleged, a rate of growth
which is positively immoral. ... To a considerable extent the
plutocracy is hated not for what it does but for what it is. . . .
It is the mere existence of a plutocracy, the mere Toeing’ of our
wealthy contemporaries, that is the main offense. Our over-
moneyed neighbors cause a relative deflation of our personali-
ties. Of course, in the consumption of wealth, as in its produc-
tion, there exist c non-competitive groups/ and a two-thousand-
dollar-a-year-man need not spend like a Gould or a Guggenl]teim.
Everywhere, however, we meet the millionaire's good and evil
works, and we seem to resent the one as much as the other. Our
jogging horses are passed by their high-power automobiles. We
are obliged to take their dust.

“By setting the pace for a frantic competitive consumption,
our infinite gradations in wealth (with which gradations the
plutocracy is inevitably associated) increase the general social
friction and produce an acute social irritation. . . . We are de-
veloping new types of destitutes — the automobileless, the yacht-

148

THE AGE OF REFORM

less, the Newport-cottageless. The subtlest of luxuries become
necessities, and their loss is bitterly resented. The discontent of
today reaches very high in the social scale. . . .

"For this reason the plutocracy is charged with having ended
our old-time equality. . . . Our industrial development (of
which the trust is but one phase) has been towards a sharpen-
ing of the angle of progression. Our eminences have become
higher and more dazzling; the goal has been raised and nar-
rowed. Although lawyers, doctors, engineers, architects, and
professional men generally, make larger salaries than ever be-
fore, the earning of one hundred thousand dollars a year by
one lawyer impoverishes by comparison the thousands of law-
yers who scrape along on a thousand a year. The widening of
the competitive field has widened the variation and has sharp-
ened the contrast between success and failure, with resulting
inequality and discontent.” 1

n. The Alienation of the Professionals

Whenever an important change takes place in modern society,
large sections of the intellectuals, the professional and opinion-
making classes, see the drift of events and throw their weight on
the side of what they feel is progress and reform. In few histori-
cal movements have these classes played a more striking role
than in Progressivism. While those intellectuals and professional
men who supported Progressive causes no doubt did so in part
for reasons that they shared with other members of the middle
classes, their view of things was also influenced by marked
changes within the professions themselves and by changes in
their social position brought about by the growing complexity
of society and by the status revolution.

In the previous era, during the industrial and political con-
flicts of the 1870’s and 1880’s, the respectable opinion-making
1 Ibid., pp. 244-8.

Chapter iv: The Status Revolution and Progressive Leaders 149

classes had given almost unqualified support to the extreme
conservative position on most issues. The Protestant ministry,
for instance, was “a massive, almost unbroken front in its de-
fense of the status quo” 2 Most college professors preached the
great truths of laissez faire and the conservative apologetics of
social Darwinism, and thundered away at labor unions and so-
cial reformers. Lawyers, except for a rare small-town spokesman
of agrarian unrest or little business, were complacent. And while
an occasional newspaper editor launched an occasional crusade,
usually on a local issue, the press was almost as unruffled.

Beginning slowly in the 1890’s and increasingly in the next
two decades, members of these professions deserted the stand-
pat conservatism of the post-Civil War era to join the main
stream of liberal dissent and to give it both moral and intellec-
tual leadership. The reasons for this reversal are complex. But
if the professional groups changed their ideas and took on new
loyalties, it was not in simple response to changes in the nature
of the country’s problems — indeed, in many ways the problems
of American life were actually less acute after 1897 — but rather
because they had become disposed to see things they had previ-
ously ignored and to agitate themselves about things that had
previously left them unconcerned. What interests me here is not
the changed external condition of American society, but the
inward social and psychological position of the professionals
themselves that made so many of them become the advisers and
the gadflies of reform movements. The alienation of the profes-
sionals was in fact a product of many developments, but among
these the effects of the status revolution must be given an im-
portant place. Conditions varied from profession to profession,
but all groups with claims to learning and skill shared a common
sense of humiliation and common grievances against the plu-
tocracy.

The contrast between the attitude of the clergy in the 1870’s

2 Henry F. May: Protestant Churches and Industrial America (New
York, 1949), p. 91.

150

THE AGE OF EEFORM

and that of the 1890’s measures the change. When the hard
times following the panic of 1873 resulted in widespread labor
unrest, culminating in the railway strikes of 1877, the Protestant
religious press was bloodthirsty in its reaction. The laborers
were described as "wild beasts” and "reckless desperadoes,” and
some of the religious papers suggested that if they could not be
clubbed into submission they should be mowed down with can-
non and Gatling guns. During the social conflicts of the 1880’s,
ministers expressed an attitude only slightly less hysterical. By
the 1890’s a liberal minority was beginning to express a far
milder view of strikes, though the chief religious papers were
still completely hostile, for instance, to the American Railway
Union in the Pullman strike of 1894. By this time, however, a
substantial reversal of opinion was under way, and the ideas of
social Christianity and the social gospel had profoundly modi-
fied the outlook of many ministers in the major denominations.
From 1895 through the Progressive era ""the doctrines developed
by the [early social-gospel] generation . . . increasingly domi-
nated the most articulate sections of American Protestantism ” 3

The clergy were probably the most conspicuous losers from
the status revolution. They not only lost ground in all the out-
ward ways, as most middle-class elements did, but were also
hard hit in their capacity as moral and intellectual leaders by
the considerable secularization that took place in American
society and intellectual life in the last three decades of the nine-
teenth century. On one hand, they were offended and at times
antagonized by the attitudes of some of the rich men in their
congregations. 4 On the other, they saw the churches losing the
support of the working class on a large and ominous scale.
Everywhere their judgments seemed to carry less weight. Re-
ligion itself seemed less important year by year, and even in

s Ibid., pp. 202-3.

4 An interesting but by no means representative case was the contro-
versy between W. S. Rainsford, rector of St. George’s ( Episcopal ) Church
in New York City, and one of his vestrymen, J. Pierpont Morgan. See
Rainsford: Story of a Varied Life (Garden City, 1924), p. 281.

Chapter rvi The Status Revolution and Progressive Leaders 151

their capacity as moral and intellectual leaders of the commu-
nity the ministers now had to share a place with the scientists
and the social scientists. In the pre-Civil War days, for example,
they had had a prominent place in the control of higher educa-
tion. Now they were being replaced on boards of trustees by
businessmen, bankers, and lawyers, 5 and the newer, more secular
universities that were being founded with the money of the
great business lords brought with them social scientists whose
word began to appropriate some of the authority that the clergy
had once held. University learning, in many fields, carried with
it the fresh and growing authority of evolutionary science, while
the ministers seemed to be preaching nothing but old creeds.

The general decline in deference to the ministerial role was
shown nowhere more clearly than in the failure of the lay gov-
ernors of Protestant congregations to maintain the standard of
living of their pastors under the complex conditions of urban
life and the rising price level of the period after 1897. Not only
were the clergy less regarded as molders of opinion, but they
were expected to carry on the arduous work of their pastorates
with means that were increasingly inadequate and to defer
meekly to far more affluent vestrymen. 6

In the light of this situation, it may not be unfair to attribute
the turning of the clergy toward reform and social criticism not
solely to their disinterested perception of social problems and

5 In 1860, clergymen comprised 39 per cent of the governing boards of
Earl McGrath’s sample of private institutions; m 1930, 7 per cent. Mc-
Grath: “The Control of Higher Education in America, Educational
Record, Vol XVII (April 1936), pp. 259-72. During the Progressive era
clergymen were also beginning to be replaced with laymen in the college
and university presidencies.

6 In 1918 a Literary Digest survey showed that only 1,671 of the 170,-
000 ministers m the United States paid taxes on incomes over $3,000. In
1920 a survey by the Interchurch World Movement found that the average
annual pastoral income was $937 Christian Advocate , Vol. XCV (July 22,
1920), p. 985. Preachers were well aware that they had reached a point at
which their wages were lower than those of many skilled workers, espe-
cially masons, plumbers, plasterers, and bricklayers. On preachers’ salaries,
see Homiletic Review , Vol. LXXXVI (December 1923), p. 437; VoL
LXXXVII (January 1924), p. 9.

152

THE AGE OF REFORM

their earnest desire to improve the world, but also to the fact
that as men who were in their own way suffering from the inci-
dence of the status revolution they were able to understand and
sympathize with the problems of other disinherited groups. The
increasingly vigorous interest in the social gospel, so clearly
manifested by the clergy after 1890, was in many respects an
attempt to restore through secular leadership some of the
spiritual influence and authority and social prestige that clergy-
men had lost through the upheaval in the system of status and
the secularization of society.

That the liberal clergy succeeded in restoring some of their
prestige by making themselves a strong force in the Progressive
ranks no student of the history of American social Christianity
is likely to deny. 7 As practical participants and as ideologists and
exhorters the clergy made themselves prominent, and a great
deal of the influence of Progressivism as well as some of its
facile optimism and naivete may be charged to their place in its
councils. Indeed, Progressivism can be considered from this
standpoint as a phase in the history of the Protestant conscience,
a latter-day Protestant revival. Liberal politics as well as liberal
theology were both inherent in the response of religion to the
seculaiization of society. No other major movement in Ameri-
can political history (unless one classifies abolitionism or pro-
hibitionism as a major movement) had ever received so much
clerical sanction. Jeffersonianism had taken the field against
powerful clerical opposition; Jacksonianism had won its tri-
umphs without benefit of clergy; but the new-model army of
Progressivism had its full complement of chaplains.

The situation of the professors is in striking contrast to that
of the clergy — and yet the academic man arrived by a different
path at the same end as the cleric. While the clergy were being
in a considerable measure dispossessed, the professors were
rising. The challenge they made to the status quo around the

7 May, op. cit., chapter iv, “The Social Gospel and American Progres-
sivism ”

Chapter iv: The Status Revolution and Progressive Leaders 153

turn of the century, especially in the social sciences, was a
challenge offered by an advancing group, growing year by year
in numbers, confidence, and professional standing. Modern
students of social psychology have suggested that certain social-
psychological tensions are heightened both in social groups that
are rising in the social scale and in those that are falling; 8 and
this may explain why two groups with fortunes as varied as the
professoriat and the clergy gave so much common and similar
support to reform ideologies.

Unlike the clergy, academic men in America before 1870 had
had no broad public influence, no professional traditions nor
self-awareness, hardly even any very serious professional stand-
ards. 9 The sudden emergence of the modern university, how-
ever, transformed American scholarship during the last three
decades of the century. Where there had been only a number of
denominational colleges, there were now large universities with
adequate libraries, laboratories, huge endowments, graduate

8 Cf Joseph Greenbaum and Leonard I. Pearlm: “Vertical Mobility and
Prejudice/' m Remhard Bendix and Seymour M. Lipset, eds Class , Status
and Power (Glencoe, Illinois, 1953), pp. 480-91, Bruno Bettelheim and
Morris Janowitz: “Ethnic Tolerance, a Function of Personal and Social
Control/' American Journal of Sociology , Vol. IV (1949), pp. 137-45

An amusing parallel to the professoriat is provided by the architects.
Nothing could be clearer than that the standards and status of this profes-
sion had been much improved m the years before the turn of the century,
yet we find one of its older members complaining m 1902 that when he
was a boy “an architect was somebody. . . . He ranked with the judge,
the leading lawyer, the eminent physician — several pegs higher in the so-
cial rack than the merely successful merchant or broker." F. W Fitz-
patrick: “The Architects," Inland Architect, Vol. XXXIX (June 1902),
pp 38-9. What could have been responsible for this false consciousness of
a decline m the position of the profession but the fact that the rise of the
architect and the development of urban business had brought him into
intimate contact with a plutocracy that made him feel small? He was un-
happy not because he had actually lost out but because the “reference
group" by which he measured his position was a different one. There
were, of course, elements of alienation from the chents based on profes-
sional considerations. See Fitzpatrick: “Architect's Responsibilities,' 5 ibid.,
Vol. L (October 1907), p. 41.

9 Richard Hofstadter and Walter P. Metzger: The Development of
Academic Freedom in the United States (New York, 1955), esp. chapters
v, vi, ix.

154

THE AGE OF REFORM

schools, professional schools, and advancing salaries. The pro-
fessoriat was growing immensely in numbers, improving in
professional standards, gaining in compensation and security,
and acquiring a measure of influence and prestige in and out of
the classroom that their predecessors of the old college era
would never have dreamed of. And yet there was a pervasive
discontent. To overestimate the measure of radicalism in the
academic community is a convention that has little truth. In the
Progressive era the primary function of the academic com-
munity was still to rationalize, uphold, and conserve the exist-
ing order of things. But what was significant in that era was
the presence of a large creative minority that set itself up
as a sort of informal brain trust to the Progressive movement.
To call the roll of the distinguished social scientists of the Pro-
gressive era is to read a list of men prominent in their criticism
of vested interests or in their support for reform causes — John R.
Commons, Richard T. Ely, E. R. A. Seligman, and Thorstein
Veblen in economics, Charles A. Beard, Arthur F. Bentley and
J. Allen Smith in political science, E. A. Ross and Lester Ward
in sociology, John Dewey in philosophy, and (for all his formal
conservatism) Roscoe Pound in law. The professors had their
intimate experience with and resentments of tire plutocracy —
which illustrates Walter Weyl’s apt remark that the benefactions
of the millionaires aroused almost as much hostility as their
evil works. Professors in America had always had the status of
hired men, but they had never had enough professional pride to
express anything more than a rare momentary protest against
this condition. Now, even though their professional situation
was improving, they found in themselves the resources to com-
plain against their position ; 1 not the least of their grievances was

1 Cf. the lament of John Dewey in 1902: “The old-fashioned college
faculty was pretty sure to be a thoro-gomg democracy m its way. Its
teachers were selected more often because of their marked individual
traits than because of pure scholarship. Each stood his own and for his
own.” “Academic Freedom,” Education Review , Vol. XXIII (January
1902), p. 13, This very idealization of the professional past was a product

Chapter iv: The Status Revolution and Progressive Leaders 155

the fact that their professional affairs were under the control of
the plutocracy, since boards of trustees were often composed of
those very businessmen who in other areas of life were becom-
ing suspect for their predatory and immoral lives. Further, aca-
demic men in the social sciences found themselves under pres-
sure to trim their sails ideologically; and caste self-consciousness
was heightened by a series of academic-freedom cases involving
in some instances the more eminent members of the emerging
social sciences — Richard T. Ely, Edward A. Ross, J. Allen Smith,
and others. In 1915 this rising self-consciousness found expres-
sion in the formation of the American Association of University
Professors.

If the professors had motives of their own for social resent-
ment, the social scientists among them had special reason for a
positive interest in the reform movements. The development
of regulative and humane legislation required the skills of law-
yers and economists, sociologists and political scientists, in the
writing of laws and in the staffing of administrative and regula-
tive bodies. Controversy over such issues created a new market
for the books and magazine articles of the experts and engen-
dered a new respect for their specialized knowledge. Reform
brought with it the brain trust. In Wisconsin even before the
turn of the century there was an intimate union between the
La Follette regime and the state university at Madison that
foreshadowed all later brain trusts. National recognition of the
importance of the academic scholar came in 1918 under Wood-
row Wilson, himself an ex-professor, when the President took
with him as counselors to Paris that grand conclave of ex-
pert advisers from several fields of knowledge which was known
to contemporaries as The Inquiry.

The legal profession, which stands in a more regular and inti-
mate relation with American politics than any other profession
or occupation, affords a good example of the changing position

of the rise of the profession. For the falseness of this idealization, see
Hofstadter and Metzger, op. cit., chapters v and vi, and passim »

156

THE AGE OF REFORM

of the middle-class professional in the development of corporate
society. The ambiguous situation of many lawyers, which often
involved both profitable subservience to and personal alienation
from corporate business, contributed significantly to the cast of
Progressive thought and the recruitment of Progressive leaders.
While many lawyers could participate in Progressive politics in
the spirit of good counselors caring for their constituents, many
also felt the impact of the common demand for reform as a re-
sponse to changes in their own profession.

In the opening decades of the century the American legal
profession was troubled by an internal crisis, a crisis in self-
respect precipitated by the conflict between the image of legal
practice inherited from an earlier age of more independent pro-
fessionalism and the realities of modem commercial practice.
Historically the American legal profession had had four out-
standing characteristics. Where it was practiced at its best in
the most settled communities, it had the position of a learned
profession with its own standards of inquiry and criticism, its
own body of ideas and ethics. A lawyer s reputation and fortune
had been based upon courtroom advocacy, forensic skill, learn-
ing, and presence. It was, secondly, a professional group of ex-
ceptional public influence and power. Tocqueville’s famous ob-
servation that in the absence of a fixed and venerable class of
rich men the closest thing to an American aristocracy was to be
found in the bench and bar may have been somewhat exagger-
ated, but it does justice to the mid-nineteenth-century position
of this professional group — the nursery of most American states-
men and of the rank and file of practicing politicians. Thirdly, a
sense of public responsibility had been present in the moral and
intellectual traditions of the bar — a feeling embodied in the
notion that the lawyer was not simply an agent of some litigant
but also by nature an “officer of the court,” a public servant.
Finally, law had been, pre-eminently in the United States, one
of the smoothest avenues along which a man who started with
only moderate social advantages might, without capital, rise

Chapter iv: The Status Revolution and Progressive Leaders 157

upward through the ranks to a position of wealth or power.
Democratic access to the bar had been jealously protected — so
much so that a peculiar notion of the 4 natural right” to practice
law had developed and many professional leaders felt that the
standards of admission to the profession had been set far too
low.

At the turn of the century lawyers as a group were far less
homogeneous than they had been fifty years before. The large,
successful firms, which were beginning even then to be called
“legal factories,” were headed by the wealthy, influential, and
normally very conservative minority of the profession that
tended to be most conspicuous in the Bar Associations. In their
firms were many talented young lawyers, serving their time as
cheap labor. There was a second echelon of lawyers in small
but well-established offices of the kind that flourished in smaller
cities; lawyers of this sort, who were commonly attached to and
often shared the outlook of new enterprisers or small business-
men, frequently staffed and conducted local politics. A third
echelon, consisting for the most part of small partnerships or
individual practitioners, usually carried on a catch-as-catch-can
practice and eked out modest livings. As the situation of the in-
dependent practitioners deteriorated, they often drifted into
ambulance-chasing and taking contingent fees. Much of the talk
in Bar Associations about improving legal ethics represented the
unsympathetic efforts of the richer lawyers with corporate con-
nections to improve the reputation of the profession as a whole
at the expense of their weaker colleagues.

A body of professional teachers of law, outside the ranks of
practicing lawyers, was also developing as an independent force
within the profession. The most effective type of legal educa-
tion, then becoming dominant in the best university law schools,
was LangdelTs case method. It had been a part of Langdell’s
conception that the proper training for the teaching of law was
not law practice but law study. As the part-time practicing law-
yer became less conspicuous in legal education and the full-time

158

THE AGE OF REFORM

teaching lawyer replaced him, the independent and professional
consciousness of the guild was once again reinforced. Lawyers
who were most attracted by the more intellectual and profes-
sional aspects of their field tended to go into teaching, just as
those most interested in public service went into politics or ad-
ministration. Young Charles Evans Hughes, for instance, tem-
porarily deserted an extremely promising career in metropolitan
practice for a relatively ill-paid job as a professor in Cornells
law school . 2 In the movement for broader conceptions of profes-
sional service, for new legal concepts and procedural reforms,
for deeper professional responsibility, for criticism of the courts,
the teaching side of the profession now became important. The
teachers became the keepers of the professional conscience and
helped implant a social view of their functions in the young men
who graduated from good law schools.

With the rise of corporate industrialism and finance capital-
ism, the law, particularly in the urban centers where the most
enviable prizes were to be had, was becoming a captive profes-
sion. Lawyers kept saying that the law had lost much of its
distinctly professional character and had become a business. Ex-
actly how much truth lay in their laments cannot be ascertained
until we know more about the history of the profession; but
whether or not their conclusions were founded upon a false sen-
timentalization of an earlier era, many lawyers were convinced
that their profession had declined in its intellectual standards
and in its moral and social position. Around the turn of the cen-
tury, the professional talents of courtroom advocacy and brief-
making were referred to again and again as "lost arts,” as the
occupation of the successful lawyer centered more and more
upon counseling clients and offering business advice. General
and versatile talent, less needed than in the old days, was re-
placed by specialized practice and the division of labor within
law firms. The firms themselves grew larger; the process of con-

2 Merlo Pusey: Charles Evans Hughes (New York, 1951), Vol. I,
pp. 95-104.

Chapter iv: The Status Revolution and Progressive Leaders 159

centration and combination in business, which limited profitable
counseling to fewer and larger firms, engendered a like concen-
tration in the law. Metropolitan law firms, as they grew larger
and more profitable, moved into closer relationships with and
became “house counsel" of the large investment houses, banks,
or industrial firms that provided them with most of their busi-
ness. But the relation that was the source of profit brought with
it a loss of independence to the great practitioners. The smaller
independent practitioner was affected in another, still more
serious way: much of his work was taken from him by real-
estate, trust, and insurance companies, collection agencies, and
banks, which took upon themselves larger and larger amounts
of what had once been entirely legal business. 3 A speaker at the
meeting of the Baltimore Bar Association in 1911 estimated that
70 per cent of the members of the profession were not making a
suitable living, “Corporations doing our business are work-
ing ... to our detriment,” he said. “Slowly, but with persist-
ence, the corporations are pushing the lawyer to the wall. They
advertise, solicit, and by their corporate influence and wealth
monopolize the legal field.” 4

That the dignity and professional independence of the bar
had been greatly impaired became a commonplace among law-
yers and well-informed laymen. “How often we hear/" declared
an eminent lawyer in an address before the Chicago Bar Asso-
ciation in 1904, “that the profession is commercialized; that the
lawyer today does not enjoy the position and influence that be-
longed to the lawyer of seventy-five or a hundred years
ago. . . ” He went on to deny — what many lawyers did not
deny — that the alleged commercialization was serious; but he
conceded that the lawyer had indeed suffered from what he
called “the changed social and industrial conditions.” These

3 See Joseph Katz: The American Legal Profession , 1890-1915, unpub-
lished M A thesis, Columbia University, 1953, for an illuminating discus-
sion of trends m the profession during this period.

4 “Corporate Monopoly in the Field of Law,” 15 Law Notes (1911),

p. 22.

160

THE AGE OF REFORM

conditions, he observed, had “taken from the lawyer some of his
eminence and influence in other than legal matters” and had
also, for that matter, “in the same may and in no less degree af-
fected the other learned professions , and indeed all educated or
exceptional men?’* Several years later another lawyer put it
somewhat more sharply in an essay entitled “The Passing of the
Legal Profession”: “The lawyer's former place in society as an
economical factor has been superseded by [the corporation] this
artificial creature of his own genius, for whom he is now simply
a clerk on a salary.” 6

Lord Bryce, in comparing the America of 1885 with the
America of Tocqueville, had concluded that “the bar counts for
less as a guiding and restraining power, tempering the crudity
or haste of democracy by its attachment to rule and precedent,
than it did.” Shortly after the turn of the century he remarked
that lawyers “are less than formerly the students of a particular
kind of learning, the practitioners of a particular art. And they
do not seem to be so much of a distinct professional class.” 7
Commenting in 1905 on Bryce's observations, Louis D. Brandeis
said that the lawyer no longer held as high a position with the
people as he had held seventy-five or indeed fifty years before;
but the reason, he asserted, was not lack of opportunity, but the

5 Lloyd W. Bowers: “The Lawyer Today,” 38 American Law Review
(1904), pp. 823, 829, italics added.

6 George W. Bristol: “The Passing of the Legal Profession,” 22 Yale
Law Journal (1912-13), p. 590. For other discussions of this and similar
issues, see George F. Shelton. “Law as a Business,” 10 Yale Law Journal
(1900), pp. 275—82; Robert Reat Platt. “The Decadence of Law as a
Profession and Its Growth as a Business,” 12 Yale Law Journal (1903),
pp 441-5; Newman W. Hoyles: “The Bar and Its Modern Development,”
3 Canadian Law Review (1904), pp. 361-6; Henry Wynans Jessup: “The
Professional Relations of the Lawyer to the Client, to the Court, and to
the Community,” 5 Brief (1904), pp 145-68, 238-55, 335-45, Albert M.
Kales: “The Economic Basis for a Society of Advocates in the City of Chi-
cago,” 9 Illinois Law Review (1915), pp. 478-88; Julius Henry Cohen:
The Law Business or Profession P (New York, 1916), John R. Dos Passos:
The American Lawyer (New York, 1907); Willard Hurst: The Growth of
American Law: the Law Makers (Boston, 1950), chapter xiii.

7 Quoted by Louis D. Brandeis: Business — a Profession (Boston, 1927),
pp. 333-4.

Chapter iv: The Status Revolution and Progressive Leaders 161

failure to maintain an independent moral focus. "Instead of
holding a position of independence, between the wealthy and
the people, prepared to curb the excesses of either, able lawyers
have, to a large extent, allowed themselves to become adjuncts
of great corporations and have neglected the obligation to use
their powers for the protection of the people. We hear much of
the "corporation lawyer/ and far too little of the people’s law-
yer. 8

Thus internal conditions, as well as those outward events
which any lawyer, as a citizen, could see, disposed a large por-
tion of this politically decisive profession to understand the im-
pulse toward change. That impecunious young or small-town
lawyers or practitioners associated with small business, and
academic teachers of law, should often have approached the
problems of law and society from a standpoint critical of the
great corporations is not too astonishing — though among these
elements only one, the teacher, was consistently articulate.
Somewhat more noteworthy is the occasional evidence of a
mixed state of mind even among some of the outstanding corpo-
ration lawyers, for whom allegiance to the essentials of the
status quo was qualified by a concern with its unremedied abuses
and a feeling of irritation with its coarsest representatives. The
top leaders of the law, in their strategic place as the source of
indispensable policy advice to the captains of industry, probably
enjoyed more wealth and as much power as lawyers had ever
had. But their influence was of course no longer independently
exercised, it was exerted through the corporation, the bank, the
business leader. As A. A. Berle remarks, "responsible leadership
in social development passed from the lawyer to the business
man,” and the principal function of the legal profession became
that of "defending, legalizing, and maintaining this exploitative

8 Ibid , p. 337; cf. Woodrow Wilson: “The Lawyer and the Commm
nity,” North American Remew , Vol. CXCII (November 1910), pp. 604r-22.
Brandeis’s interest m having the lawyers play a mediating role between
social classes may be compared with the comments of Tocqueville on this
function of the profession: Democracy in America, Vol. I, chapter xvi.

162

THE AGE OF REFORM

development.” 9 The corporation lawyer lived in frequent asso-
ciation with businessmen who were oppressively richer, con-
siderably less educated, and sometimes less scrupulous than
himself. By professional tradition and training he saw things
with much more disinterested eyes than they did; and although
it was his business to serve and advise them, he sometimes re-
coiled. "About half the practice of a decent lawyer,” Elihu Root
once said, "consists in telling would-be clients that they are
damned fools and should stop.” 1 "No amount of professional
employment by corporations,” he wrote to a correspondent in
1898, 'has blinded me to the political and social dangers which
exist in their relations to government and public affairs. ...” 2
Such men turned to public service with a sense of release. Root
found that his work as Secretary of War under McKinley
brought "a thousand new interests” into his life and that his
practice seemed futile in comparison with his sense of accom-
plishment in Cabinet work. 3 Similarly, Henry L. Stimson told
his Yale classmates at their twentieth reunion, in 1908, that he
had never found the legal profession "thoroughly satisfactory
. . . simply because the life of the ordinary New York lawyer is
primarily and essentially devoted to the making of money — and
not always successfully so. . , . It has always seemed to me, in
the law from what I have seen of it, that wherever the public
interest has come into conflict with private interests, private in-
terest was more adequately represented than the public inter-
est.” After the last three years of his private practice, which
were concerned with the affairs of "the larger corporations of

9 A. A. Berle: ‘‘Modem Legal Profession,” in Encyclopedia of the So-
cial Sciences.

1 Willard Hurst, op. cit , p. 345, there are many complexities in lawyer-
client relationships not dealt with here. On lawyer-client alienation, see
David Riesman. ‘Some Observations on Law and Psychology,” University
of Chicago Law Review , Vol. XIX (Autumn 1951), pp 33-4, and “To-
ward an Anthropological Science of Law and the Legal Profession,”
American Journal of Sociology , Vol. LVH (September 1951), pp. 130-1.

2 Hurst, op. cit., p. 369.

2 Ibid., p. 369.

Chapter iv: The Status Revolution and Progressive Leaders 163

New York,” he reported that when he did turn to federal service
as a United States attorney (his important early cases were
prosecutions for rebating), his “first feeling was that I had got-
ten out of the dark places where I had been wandering all my
life, and got out where I could see the stars and get my bearings
once more. . . . There has been an ethical side of it which has
been of more interest to me, and I have felt that I could get a
good deal closer to the problems of life than I ever did before,
and felt that the work was a good deal more worth while. And
one always feels better when he feels that he is working in a
good cause.” 4

It may be objected that the progressivism espoused by cor-
poration lawyers on a moral holiday would be a rather con-
servative sort of thing. In fact it was, but this was not out of
harmony with the general tone of the Progressive movement,
especially in the Eastern states, where this kind of leadership
played an important role. There Progressivism was a mild and
judicious movement, whose goal was not a sharp change in the
social structure, but rather the formation of a responsible elite,
which was to take charge of the popular impulse toward change
and direct it into moderate and, as they would have said, “con-
structive” channels — a leadership occupying, as Brandeis so
aptly put it, “a position of independence between the wealthy
and the people, prepared to curb the excesses of either.”

in. From the Mugwump to the Progressive

What I have said thus far about the impact of the status revolu-
tion may help to explain the occurrence of the Progressive

4 Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy: On Active Service in Peace
and War (New York, 1948), p. 17. Stimson’s background provides an in-
teresting insight into the moral atmosphere of the Mugwump type. His fa-
ther, an old-family New Yorker, had been a banker and broker. After
earning a modest fortune, he had quit business for the study and practice
of medicine. He lived modestly and earned on his medical work in con-
nection with philanthropic organizations. Ibid., p. xvu.

164

THE AGE OF REFORM

movement, but will not account for its location in time. A perti-
nent question remains to be answered: as the status revolution
had been going on at least since the Civil War and was certainly
well advanced by the 1890’s, why did the really powerful out-
burst of protest and reform come only with the first fifteen years
of the twentieth century? Why did our middle classes, after six
years of civic anxieties and three years of acute and ominous
depression, give Hanna and McKinley a strong vote of confi-
dence in 1896? And then after this confidence seemed in fact to
have been justified by the return of prosperity, when the nations
sense of security and power had been heightened by a quick
victory in what John Hay called “our splendid little war,” and
when a mood of buoyant optimism had again become dominant,
why should they have turned about and given ardent support
to the forces that were raking American life with criticism?

First, it must be said that in some areas of American life those
phenomena that we associate with the Progressive era were al-
ready much in evidence before 1900. In a limited and local way
the Progressive movement had in fact begun around 1890. On
the part of some business interests the movement for cheap
transportation and against monopoly had already waxed strong
enough to impel a reluctant Congress to pass the Interstate
Commerce Act in 1887 and the Sherman Act in 1890. 5 Likewise
the crusade for municipal reform was well under way in the
1890s. A very large number of local organizations dedicated to
good government and a variety of reforms had sprung into exist-
ence, and in some cities they had already achieved more than
negligible changes. 6 Finally, the state legislatures had already
begun to pass the sort of social legislation — regulation of hours

5 The traditional emphasis on agrarian discontent has diverted attention
from the pressure from business for such measures. See Lee Benson* New
York Merchants and Farmers in the Communications Revolution , unpub-
lished Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 1952.

6 Clifford W. Patton: The Battle for Municipal Reform (Washington,
1940), chapter iv. William Howe Tolman: Municipal Reform Movements
in the United States (New York, 1895) has a suggestive summary of over
seventy such organizations.

Chapter rv: The Status Revolution and Progressive Leaders 165

and conditions of labor, for instance — that was later fostered
more effectually by the Progressives. 7

These were the timid beginnings of a movement that did not
become nationwide until the years after 1901. One important
thing that kept them from going further during the nineties was
that the events of that decade frightened the middle classes so
thoroughly that they did not dare dream of taking seriously
ideas that seemed to involve a more fundamental challenge
to established ways of doing things. The Progressive appeal was
always directed very largely to people who felt that they did
have something to lose. Populism, which was widely portrayed
as "menacing socialism in the Western states," the Homestead
and Pullman strikes with their violence and class bitterness, the
march of Coxey’s army, the disastrous slump in business activity,
and the lengthening breadlines seemed like the beginnings of
social revolution; and in the imagination of the timid bourgeois,
Bryan, Altgeld, and Debs seemed like the Dantons, Robespierres,
and Marats of the coming upheaval. Hence there was a disposi-
tion among the middle classes to put aside their own discontents
and grievances until the time should come when it seemed safe
to air them. 8

More pertinent, perhaps, is the fact that the Progressive fer-
ment was the work of the first generation that had been bom
and raised in the midst of the status revolution. In 1890 the
governing generation still consisted of men born in the 1830's
and 1840's, who through force of habit still looked upon events
with the happier vision of the mid-nineteenth century. During
the next twenty years the dominant new influence came from
those who were still young enough in the nineties to have their

7 Legislation m this field before and after 1900 may be compared in
Elizabeth Brandeis’s treatment of the subject, John R. Commons, ed.: His-
tory of Labor in the United States , Vol. Ill (New York, 1935), pp. 399 if.
The chief fields that had been entered by state legislatures before 1900
were child labor, hours of women’s labor, and employers’ Lability.

8 There were, for instance. Eastern urban election districts, normally
heavily Democratic, m which Bryan’s support fell drastically m 1896 from
its normal level both before and after.

166

THE AGE OF REFORM

thinking affected by the hard problems just emerging, problems
for which the older generation, reared in the age of the great
transcontinental settlement, had no precedents and no convinc-
ing answers. The crisis of the nineties was a searing experience.
During the depression of 1893-7 it was clear that the country
was being profoundly shaken, that men everywhere were be-
ginning to envisage a turning-point in national development
after which one could no longer live within the framework of
the aspirations and expectations that had governed American
life for the century past. Americans had grown up with the
placid assumption that the development of their country was
so much unlike what had happened elsewhere that the social
conflicts troubling other countries could never become a major
problem here. By the close of the century, however, younger
Americans began to feel that it would be their fate to live
in a world subject to all the familiar hazards of European
industrialism. “A generation ago,” said one of the characters in
Henry Blake Fullers With the Procession (1895), "we thought
. . . that our pacific processes showed social science in its full-
est development. But today we have all the elements possessed
by the old world itself, and we must take whatever they de-
velop, as the old world does. We have the full working apparatus
finally, with all its resultant noise, waste, stenches, stains, dan-
gers, explosions.” 9

The generation that went Progressive was the generation that
came of age in the nineties. Contemporaries had often noticed
how large a portion of the leaders at any Populist convention
were the silver-haired veterans of old monetary reform cru-
sades; Progressivism, however, passed into the hands of youth —
William Allen White remembered them in his autobiography as
the ‘hunch eds of thousands of young men in their twenties,
thirties, and early forties” whose “quickening sense of the in-
equities, injustices, and fundamental wrongs” of American so-
ciety provided the motive power of reform. 1 The ascension of

9 Henry Blake Fuller. With the Procession (New York, 1895), p. 245.

1 White: Autobiography, p 367.

Chapter iv: The Status Revolution and Progressive Leaders 167

Theodore Roosevelt to the presidency, the youngest man ever
to occupy the White House, was no more than symbolic of the
coming-of-age of a generation whose perspectives were sharply
demarcated from those of their fathers and who felt the need of
a new philosophy and a new politics. 2 T. R. himself had been
thirty-two in 1890, Bryan only thirty, La Follette thirty-five,
Wilson thirty-four. Most of the Progressive leaders, as well as
the muckraking journalists who did so much to form Progressive
opinion, were, at the opening of that crucial fin de sidcle decade,
in their early thirties, or perhaps younger, and hence only
around forty when the Progressive era got under way. 3

The Progressive leaders were the spiritual sons of the
Mugwumps, but they were sons who dropped much of the
ideological baggage of their parents. Where the Mugwumps had
been committed to aristocracy, in spirit if not in their formal
theories of government, the Progressives spoke of returning gov-
ernment to the people; and where the Mugwumps had clung des-
perately to liberal economics and the cliches of laissez faire, the
Progressives were prepared to make use of state intervention
wherever it suited their purposes. The Mugwumps had lacked
a consistent and substantial support among the public at large.
The Progressives had an almost rabidly enthusiastic following.
The Mugwumps, except on sporadic occasions, were without
allies among other sectors of the country. The Progressives had,
on a substantial number of national issues, reliable allies in the
very agrarian rebels for whom the Mugwumps had had nothing
but contempt. In many ways the Mugwump type was refash-
ioned into the Progressive by the needs and demands of its own

2 As a consequence of the sharp difference in the viewpoint of the gen-
erations, family conflicts around the turn of the century tended to take on
an ideological colormg. For the treatment of this theme m the works of the
most popular Progressive novelist, see Richard and Beatrice Hofstadter:
“Winston Churchill: a Study in the Popular Novel,” American Quarterly ,
Vol. II (Spring 1950), pp. 12-28.

3 Cf, Mowry: “Compositely, the California progressive leader was a
young man, often less than forty years old. ... In 1910 the average age
of ten of the most prominent Progressives was thirty-eight.” The California
Progressives , pp. 87, 313.

168

THE AGE OF REFORM

followers. The circumstances that awakened the public and
provided the Progressive leaders with large urban support are
the subject of the next two chapters. But I may anticipate here
at least one constellation of events that had vital importance,
which centered on the reversal in the price trend. The unorgan-
ized middle class now found itself in the midst of a steady up-
ward trend in the price cycle that was linked with the growing
organization of American industry and labor. Prices, which be-
gan to go up after 1897, continued to go up steadily throughout
the Progressive era, and indeed even more steeply during the war
that followed. In the years between 1897 and 1913 the cost of
living rose about 35 per cent. Those of us who have endured the
inflation of the past fifteen years may smile at such a modest rise
in prices; but the price movement of 1897-1913 was not ac-
cepted complacently by the generation that experienced it —
particularly not by those who lacked the means to defend them-
selves against it by augmenting their incomes or by those who
found the growth in their incomes largely eaten up by the
higher cost of living. Just as the falling prices of the period
1865-96 had spurred agrarian discontents, so the rising prices
of this era added to the strength of the Progressive discontents.

Rising prices in themselves were trouble enough; but the high
cost of living took on added significance because it was associ-
ated in the public mind with two other unwelcome tendencies:
the sudden development of a vigorous, if small, labor move-
ment, and an extraordinary acceleration in the trustification of
American industry. Both of these took place with alarming sud-
denness in the years from 1898 to 1904. John Moody singles out
1898 as "the year in which the modern trust-forming period
really dates its beginning.” 4 General business prosperity, rising
prices, and an active securities market spurred on this burst of
trust formation. Of the 318 trusts listed by Moody in 1904, 82,
with a total capitalization of $1,196,700,000, had been organized
before 1898. But 234, with a capitalization of over $6,000,000,-

4 John Moody: The Truth about the Trusts (New York, 1904), p. 486.

Chapter iv: The Status Revolution and Progressive Leaders 169

000 had been organized in the years between January 1, 1898
and January 1, 1904. 5 Thus in this short period almost three
quarters of the trusts and almost six sevenths of the capital in
trusts had come into existence. It was during the last years of
McKinley’s administration and the early years of Roosevelt’s
that such frighteningly large organizations as the United States
Steel Corporation, Standard Oil, Consolidated Tobacco, Amal-
gamated Copper, International Mercantile Marine Company,
and the American Smelting and Refining Company were in-
corporated. Major local consolidations simultaneously took place,
in the fields of the telephone, telegraph, gas, traction, and elec-
tric power and light

Far less spectacular, but none the less nettlesome to the
middle-class mentality, were the developments in labor organiza-
tion. During the long price decline of 1865-96 the real wages of
labor had been advancing steadily at the average rate of 4 per
cent a year. 6 But beginning with the upward trend of prices in
1897, these automatic gains not only ceased but were turned into
losses, as unorganized workers found themselves unable to
keep abreast of the steady advance in commodity prices. While
real annual wages rose slightly during the period 1900-14, real
hourly wages remained almost stationary. 7 Under the spur of
rising prices and the favorable auspices of good business con-
ditions, the young A.F. of L. seized its opportunity to organize
skilled workers. By 1911 the membership of all American trade
unions was five times what it had been in 1897; that of the A.F.
of L. was almost seven times as large. Total union membership
had grown from 447,000 to 2, 382, 000, 8 and, as in the case of in-
dustry, most of this new organization was concentrated in a

5 Henry R. Seager and Charles A. Gulick, Jr.: Trust and Corporation
Problems (New York, 1929), pp. 60-7.

6 Black: Parity , Parity , Parity , p. 74.

7 Paul H. Douglas: Real Wages in the United States , 1890-1926 (Bos-
ton, 1930), p. 111.

8 Leo Wolman. The Growth of Trade Unionism (New York, 1924),
p. 33. Figures for all unions are estimates, they exclude the membership of
company unions.

170

THE AGE OF REFORM

sharp organizing drive between 1897 and 1904, a drive marked
by a large increase in the number of strikes.

The price rise after 1897 was a part of a world-wide trend,
connected with the discovery of new gold supplies and new re-
fining processes. How much of it can properly be laid to the
growing organization of industry is a moot point. What is most
relevant here, however, is that the restive consuming public was
not content to attribute the high cost of living to such imper-
sonal causes. The average middle-class citizen felt the pinch in
his pocketbook. 9 On one side he saw the trusts mushrooming al-
most every day and assumed that they had something to do with
it. On the other he saw an important segment of the working
class organizing to protect itself, and in so doing also contribut-
ing, presumably, a bit more to higher prices. He saw himself as
a member of a vast but unorganized and therefore helpless con-
suming public. He felt that he understood very well what
Woodrow Wilson meant when he declared that "The high cost
of living is arranged by private understanding,” 1 and he became
indignant. The movement against the trusts took on new mean-
ing and new power. To be sure, there had always been anti-
trust sentiment, and the argument that the trusts would squeeze
the consumers after they had eliminated their competitors had
been familiar for more than a generation. So long, however, as
prices were declining, this fear had lacked urgency. Now that
prices were rising, it became a dominant motif in American life. 2

It was in the Progressive era that the urban consumer first
stepped forward as a serious and self-conscious factor in Auneri-

9 Those portions of the middle classes that were on fixed salaries lost
ground; notable among them were postal employees, many clerical work-
ers, government employees, and ministers. Harold U. Faulkner: The De-
cline of Laissez Faire (New York, 1951), p. 252.

1 The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson , Vol II (New York, 1925),
p. 462. For a discussion of the cost-of-living issue by a contemporary, see
Frederic C. Howe: The High Cost of Living (New York, 1917)

2 Cf. Walter Weyl, op. cit., p. 251* “The universality of the rise of
prices has begun to affect the consumer as though he were attacked by a
million gnats. The chief offense of the trust becomes its capacity to injure
the consumer.”

Chapter iv: The Status Revolution and Progressive Leaders 171

can social politics. “We hear a great deal about the class-
consciousness of labor,” wrote Walter Lippmann in 1914. “My
own observation is that in America today consumers’-conscious-
ness is growing very much faster.” 3 Week after week the popu-
lar magazines ran articles of protest or speculations about the
causes of the difficulty, in which the high protective tariff and
the exactions of middlemen and distributors sometimes shared
with the conspiratorial decisions of the trust executives as ob-
jects of denunciation. While such men as Theodore Roosevelt
and E. A. Ross were decrying small families among the “best”
family stocks and warning about the dangers of “race suicide,”
women writers in the magazines were asserting that the high
cost of rent, food, and fuel made smaller families inevitable. 4

Of the actual organization of consumers there was very little,
for consumers’ co-operation was a form of action that had no
traditional roots in the United States. In the absence of organi-
zations, consumer discontent tended to focus upon political is-
sues. This itself marked a considerable change. In 1897, when
Louis D. Brandeis had testified against the Dingley tariff before
the House Ways and Means Committee as a representative of

3 Walter Lippmann: Drift and Mastery (New York, 1914), p. 73; cf.
pp. 66-76

4 Christine T. Hemck. “Concerning Race Suicide,” North American
Review , Vol. CLXXXIV (February 15, 1907), p. 407, argued that it was
impossible to raise large families and maintain an adequate standard of
living, especially for clerks, clergymen, newspapermen, and writers, on
whom she felt the inflation worked the greatest hardship.

In 1907 the Independent published an article by a New York City
woman who reported that she had been forced to go to work to supplement
her husband's income. After submitting a detailed analysis of the family
budget, she closed with this stark manifesto: “Now, gentlemen, You Who
Rule Us, we are your wage slaves.’ . . . You Who Rule Us may take our
savings and go to Europe with them, or do sleight of hand tricks in insur-
ance and railroading with them, so that we will not know where they are.
You may raise our rent and the prices of our food steadily, as you have
been doing for years back, without raising our wages to correspond. You
can refuse us any certainty of work, wages, or provision for old age. We
cannot help ourselves But there is one thing you cannot do. You cannot ask
me to breed food for your factories.” “A Woman's Reason,” Independent
(April 4, 1904), pp. 780-4.

172

THE AGE OF REFORM

the consumers, he was greeted with jeers. 5 By 1906, when the
Pure Food and Drug Act was being debated, it had become
clear that consumer interests counted for something at least in
politics. By 1909, when the Republican insurgents were waging
their battle against the Payne-Aldrich tariff bill in the name of
“the American housewife,” the sophistries of Senator Aldrich at
the expense of the consumers (“Who are the consumers? Is
there any class except a very limited one that consumes and
does not produce?” ) 6 were altogether out of tune with popular
feeling. The Payne-Aldrich tariff was as important as any other
mistake in bring about the debacle of the Taft administration. 7

Vague as it was, consumer consciousness became a thing of
much significance because it was the lowest common political
denominator among classes of people who had little else to unite
them on concrete issues. A focus for the common interests of all
classes that had to concern themselves over family budgets, it
cut across occupational and class lines, and did a great deal to
dissolve the old nineteenth- century American habit of viewing
political issues solely from the standpoint of the producer. In
the discussion of many issues one now heard considerably less
about their effects on the working class, the middle class, and
the farmer, and a great deal more about “the plain people,” “the
common man,” “the taxpayer,” “the ultimate consumer,” and
“the man on the street.” A token of a major shift in the Amer-
ican economy and American life from an absorbing concern
with production to an equal concern with consumption as a
sphere of life, this trend gave mass appeal and political force
to many Progressive issues and provided the Progressive leaders
with a broad avenue of access to the public.

5 Alpheus T. Mason* Brandeis (New York, 1946), pp. 91-2.

6 Hechler, op. cit, p. 106

7 Cf. Henry F. Pringle: The Life and Times of William Howard Taft ,
(New York, 1939), Vol. I, chapter xxiv.

((( 173 )))

CHAPTER V

THE PROGRESSIVE IMPULSE

I. The Urban Scene

F

1L rom 1860 to 1910, towns and cities sprouted up with mi-
raculous rapidity all over the United States. Large cities grew
into great metropolises, small towns grew into large cities, and
new towns sprang into existence on vacant land. While the rural
population almost doubled during this half century, the urban
population multiplied almost seven times. Places with more than
50,000 inhabitants increased in number from 16 to 109. 1 The
larger cities of the Middle West grew wildly. Chicago more than
doubled its population in the single decade from 1880 to 1890,
while the Twin Cities trebled theirs, and others like Detroit, Mil-
waukee, Columbus, and Cleveland increased from sixty to
eighty per cent. 2

The city, with its immense need for new facilities in transpor-
tation, sanitation, policing, light, gas, and public structures, of-
fered a magnificent internal market for American business. And
business looked for the sure thing, for privileges, above all for
profitable franchises and for opportunities to evade as much as

1 1 have followed recent census designations in defining "urban” popu-
lation as that living in incorporated places having 2,500 inhabitants or
more. The rural population grew from 25,226,000 to 49,973,000 while the
urban grew from 6,216,000 to 41,998,000 The most rapid rate of growth
was shown in the very large cities of 100,000 or more. See Historical Statist
tics of the United States, 1789-1945 (Washington, 1949), pp. 16, 25, 29.

2 Arthur M. Schlesinger: The Rise of the City (New York, 1933), p. 64*

174

THE AGE OF REFORM

possible of the burden of taxation. The urban boss, a dealer in
public privileges who could also command public support, be-
came a more important and more powerful figure. With him
came that train of evils which so much preoccupied the liberal
muckraking mind: the bartering of franchises, the building of
tight urban political machines, the marshaling of hundreds of
thousands of ignorant voters, the exacerbation of poverty and
slums, the absence or excessive cost of municipal services, the
co-operation between politics and “commercialized vice” — in
short, the entire system of underground government and open
squalor that provided such a rich field for the crusading jour-
nalists.

Even with the best traditions of public administration, the
complex and constantly changing problems created by city
growth would have been enormously difficult. Cities throughout
the industrial world grew rapidly, almost as rapidly as those of
the United States. But a great many of the European cities had
histories stretching back hundreds of years before the founding
of the first white village in North America, and therefore had
traditions of government and administration that predated the
age of unrestricted private enterprise. While they too were dis-
figured and brutalized by industrialism, they often managed to
set examples of local administration and municipal planning
that American students of municipal life envied and hoped to
copy. 3 American cities, springing into life out of mere villages,
often organized around nothing but the mill, the factory, or the
railroad, peopled by a heterogeneous and mobile population,
and drawing upon no settled governing classes for administra-
tive experience, found the pace of their growth far out of pro-
portion to their capacity for management. “The problem in

3 The works of the city reformer Frederic C. Howe are still worth study.
See The City the Hope of Democracy (New York, 1905), The British City
(New York, 1907), esp. chapter xv, European Cities at Work (New York,
1913), esp. chapter xxi, and The Modern City and Its Problems (New
York, 1915). On city development see also Lewis Mumford: The Culture
of Cities (New York, 1938).

175

Chapter v: The Progressive Impulse

America/* said Seth Low, “has been to make a great city in a
few years out of nothing.” 4

The combination of underdeveloped traditions of manage-
ment and mushroom growth put a premium on quick, short-
range improvisation and on action without regard for consid-
ered rules — a situation ideal for the development of the city boss
and informal government. The consequences were in truth dis-
mal. Lord Bryce thought that the government of cities was “the
one conspicuous failure of the United States.” 5 Andrew D.
White asserted in 1890 that “with very few exceptions, the city
governments of the United States are the worst in Christendom
— the most expensive, the most inefficient, and the most cor-
rupt.” 6

One of the keys to the American mind at the end of the old
century and the beginning of the new was that American cities
were filling up in very considerable part with small-town or
rural people. The whole cast of American thinking in this period
was deeply affected by the experience of the rural mind con-
fronted with the phenomena of urban life, its crowding, poverty,
crime, corruption, impersonality, and ethnic chaos. To the rural
migrant, raised in respectable quietude and the high-toned
moral imperatives of evangelical Protestantism, the city seemed
not merely a new social form or way of life but a strange threat
to civilization itself. The age resounds with the warnings of
prophets like Josiah Strong that the city, if not somehow tamed,
would bring with it the downfall of the nation. “The first city,”
wrote Strong, “was built by the first murderer, and crime and
vice and wretchedness have festered in it ever since.” 7

In the city the native Yankee-Protestant American encoun-
tered the immigrant. Between the close of the Civil War and the
outbreak of the first World War, the rise of American industry

4 In the chapter on municipal government he wrote for Bryce’s Ameri-
can Commonwealth , Vol. I, p. 652.

5 Ibid., p. 637.

6 Forum, Vol X (December 1890), p. 25.

7 Josiah Strong. The Twentieth Century City (New York, 1898), p. 181.

176

THE AGE OF REFORM

and the absence of restrictions drew a steady stream of immi-
grants, which reached its peak in 1907 when 1,285,000 immi-
grant entries were recorded. By 1910, 13,345,000 foreign-born
persons were living in the United States, or almost one seventh
of the total population. The country had long been accustomed
to heavy immigration, but the native Yankee was not prepared
for the great shift in the sources of immigration, especially no-
ticeable after 1900, from the familiar English, Irish, Scandinavi-
ans, and Germans to the peasantry of southern and eastern Eu-
rope — swarms of Poles, Italians, Russians, eastern European
Jews, Hungarians, Slovaks, and Czechs. The native was horri-
fied by the conditions under which the new Americans lived —
their slums, their crowding, their unsanitary misery, their alien
tongues and religion — and he was resentful of the use the local
machines made of the immigrant vote. 8 For it was the boss who
saw the needs of the immigrant and made him the political in-
strument of the urban machine. The machine provided quick
naturalization, jobs, social services, personal access to authority,
release from the surveillance of the courts, deference to ethnic
pride. In return it garnered votes, herding to the polls new citi-
zens, grateful for services rendered and submissive to experi-
enced leadership.

In many great cities the Yankee found himself outnumbered
and overwhelmed. A city like Baltimore, where native children
of native parents outnumbered immigrants and their children,
was a rarity among the large cities. Far more characteristic of
the East and Midwest were Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, New
York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis, where the native
stock was considerably outnumbered by the foreign-born and
their children of the first generation. 9 Often the Yankee felt him-

8 “In those days educated citizens of cities said, and I think they be-
lieved — they certainly acted upon the theory — that it was the ignorant
foreign nff-raff of the big congested towns that made municipal politics so
bad/ Lincoln Steffens. Autobiography (New York, 1931), p. 400.

9 See the charts in Frank Juhan Wame: The Immigrant Invasion (New
York, 1913), facing pp. 118-19.

177

Chapter v: The Progressive Impulse

self pushed into his own ghetto, marked off perhaps by its su-
perior grooming but also by the political powerlessness of its
inhabitants . 1 The Irish politician — the established immigrant
who knew how to manage — surveyed the situation and found it
good, but the Yankee brooded over “the Irish conquest of our
cities,” and wondered if it meant the beginning of the end of
traditional American democracy . 2 The Mugwump type, resent-
ful of the failure of both capitalist and immigrant to consider
the public good before personal welfare, had always been trou-
bled about the long-range consequences of unrestricted immi-
gration and had begun to question universal suffrage out of a
fear that traditional democracy might be imperiled by the de-
cline of ethnic homogeneity . 3 Early civic reform was strongly
tainted with nativism.

Hostility to immigrants was probably most common near the
extreme ends of the political spectrum, among ultraconserva-
tives and among those Progressives whose views were most in-
fluenced by the Populist inheritance . 4 The Populistic Progres-

1 Cf. Thomas Bailey Aldnch: ‘‘Kipling described exactly the govern-
ment of every city and town m the . . . United States when he described
that of New York as being ‘a despotism of the alien, by the alien, for the
alien, tempered with occasional insurrections of decent folk!’” Ferris
Greenslet: Life of Thomas Bailey Aldnch (New York, 1908), p. 169.

2 Cf. John Paul Bocock: “The Irish Conquest of Our Cities,” Forum,
Vol. XVII (April 1894), pp. 186-95, which hsts a large roster of cities
ruled by the Irish minority. “Philadelphia, Boston, and New York were
once governed by the Quaker, the Puritan, and the Knickerbockers. Are
they better governed now, since from the turbulence of municipal politics
the Irish American has plucked both wealth and power? Surely those who
are too scrupulous to contend with him for those rewards should be the last
to decry him for his success in securing them.” Ibid., p. 195.

3 See John Higham: “Origins of Immigration Restriction, 1882-1897: a
Social Analysis,” Mississippi Historical Review , Vol. XXXIX (June 1952),
pp. 77-88, and Barbara Miller Solomon: “The Intellectual Background of
the Immigration Restriction Movement m New England,” New England
Quarterly , Vol. XXV (March 1952), pp. 47-59. For the views of historians
see Edward Saveth: American Historians and European Immigrants (New
York, 1948).

4 Thus in the election of 1912 the Taft Republicans adopted a platform
that gestured vaguely toward immigration restriction while the Bull
Moosers spoke of the necessity to aid, protect, and Amencamze the immi-

178

THE AGE OF REFORM

sives were frank to express their dislike of the immigrant and to
attack unrestricted immigration with arguments phrased in
popular and “liberal” language. Many labor leaders stood with
them on this issue, 5 and so did a number of academic scholars.
Men like Edward A. Ross, John R. Commons, and Edward
Bemis, all three of whom were considered radicals and lost
academic jobs on this ground, gave learned support to the anti-
immigrant sentiment. 6 Ross, formerly a Populist and now one of
the leading ideologues of Progressivism, a stalwart member of
the La Follette brain trust at the University of Wisconsin, in
1914 wrote a tract on immigration, The Old World in the New ,
that expressed the anti-immigrant case from the Anglo-Saxon
Progressive standpoint. Although he discussed the older immi-
grant stocks with some indulgence, Ross was unsparing with
the currently most numerous immigrants from southern and
eastern Europe. Immigration, he said, was good for the rich,
the employing class, and a matter of indifference to the short-
sighted professional classes with whom immigrants could not
compete, but it was disastrous for native American workers.
Immigrants were strikebreakers and scabs, who lowered wage
levels and reduced living standards toward their “pigsty mode
of life,” just as they brought social standards down to “their
brawls and their animal pleasures.” They were unhygienic and
alcoholic, they raised the rate of illiteracy and insanity, they
fostered crime and bad morals; they lowered the tone of politics
by introducing ethnic considerations and of journalism by pro-
viding readership for the poorest newspapers, the yellow jour-

grant. The Democratic Party, containing both the urban machines and the
more radical agrarians, who stood most sharply at odds on this issue, strad-
dled it by making no reference to the problem.

6 Of course one reason why the immigrant held so fast to his ethnic
loyalties was that he could not develop any class loyalties because he was
excluded by the unions. Their attitude confirmed his feeling that he was
different. For Samuel Gompers’s views on “racial purity,” see Arthur
Manns illuminating essay. <f Gompers and the Irony of Racism,” Antioch
Review (Summer 1953), pp. 203-14.

6 See, for instance, Commons’s Races and Immigrants in America; cf.
Higham, op. cit., pp. 81, 85.

179

Chapter v: The Progressive Impulse

nals; they threatened the position of women with their "coarse
peasant philosophy of sex” and debased the educational system
with parochial schools; they spurred the monstrous overgrowth
of cities, and by selling their votes for protection and favors in-
creased the grip of the bosses upon city politics; they bred in
such numbers that they were increasingly dominant over the
native stock and thus threatened to overwhelm "American
blood” and bastardize American civilization . 7

Ross’s book was an expression by an articulate and educated
man of feelings that were most common among the uneducated
and among those who were half ashamed to articulate them.
Hardly anyone devoted to the ways of the predominantly
Anglo-Saxon civilization and political culture of the United
States could help giving some troubled thought to the con-
sequences for its future of such heavy immigration on the
part of peoples whose ways were so completely different. But
more characteristic of the educated Progressive than Ross’s
harsh judgments and his studied appeal to what he called "pride
of race” was the attempt to meet the immigration problem with
a program of naturalization and Americanization . 8 Moderate
conservatives and liberal-minded Progressives alike joined in
the cause of Americanizing the immigrant by acquainting him
with English and giving him education and civic instruction.

7 Edward A. Ross: The Old World in the New (New York, 1914),
passim , esp. pp. 219, 220, 226-7, 237, 272, 279-80, 286-7, 304, and chap-
ters vii, ix, x. Cf. some of the nonsense about “race” in William Allen
White's The Old Order Changeth (New York, 1910), pp. 128-30, 197-9,
252, which, however, takes a more optimistic view or the future. Ross's
views should be compared with those of the racist, anti-immigrant faction
in the Socialist Party. Ira Kipius: The American Socialist Movement , 1897-
1912 , pp. 276-88. In 1936, when Ross published his autobiography, he
repudiated some of the racist implications of his earlier work. Seventy
Years of It (New York, 1936), chapter xxvii.

8 Edward G. Hartmann: The Movement to Americanize the Immigrant
(New York, 1948). The Populists who accused businessmen of being indif-
ferent to the immigrant's status m American life were not altogether cor-
rect. Such organizations as the North American Civic League for Immi-
grants received much support from businessmen who were interested in
introducing immigrants to American life and keeping them clear of agi-
tators.

180

THE AGE OF REFORM

One senses again and again in the best Progressive literature on
immigration that the old nativist Mugwump prejudice is being
held in check by a strenuous effort of mind and will, that the
decent Anglo-Saxon liberals were forever reminding themselves
of their own humane values, of the courage of the immigrant,
the reality of his hardships, the poignancy of his deracination,
the cultural achievements of his homeland, his ultimate poten-
tialities as an American, and, above all, of the fact that the bulk
of the hard and dirty work of American industry and urban life
was his. Those Progressives who were engaged in practical
politics in industrial communities also realized that they must
appeal to the pride as well as to the interests of the immigrant if
they were to have lasting success.

But the typical Progressive and the typical immigrant were
immensely different, and the gulf between them was not usually
bridged with much success in the Progressive era. The immi-
grant could not shear off his European identity with the rapidity
demanded by the ideal of Americanization. He might be willing
to take advantage of the practical benefits of night schools and
English-language courses and to do what he could to take on a
new nationality and learn about American ways. But even if he
felt no hostility, he could hardly fail to sense the note of con-
descension in the efforts of those who tried to help him . 9 More
often than not, he rebuffed the settlement worker or the agent
of Americanization, and looked elsewhere for his primary con-
tacts with American political and civic life. He turned, instead,
to the political boss, who accepted him for what he was and
asked no questions.

In politics, then, the immigrant was usually at odds with the

9 For a spirited statement of the immigrant reaction, see Bagdasar K.
Baghdigian: Americanism in Americanization (Kansas City, Mo., 1921).
The immigrant reaction became most outspoken during the war, when the
Americamzers, startled by the sudden realization of the strength of alien
loyalties, accelerated their efforts. “The immigrant is by no means stupid,”
declared an immigrant newspaper in 1919. “He feels the patronizing atti-
tude the American adopts towards him, and therefore never opens his
soul ” Hartmann, op. cit., p. 258.

181

Chapter v: The Progressive Impulse

reform aspirations of the American Progressive. Together with
the native conservative and the politically indifferent, the im-
migrants formed a potent mass that limited the range and the
achievements of Progressivism. The loyalty of immigrant voters
to the bosses was one of the signal reasons why the local reform
victories were so short-lived. It would be hard to imagine types
of political culture more alien to each other than those of the
Yankee reformer and the peasant immigrant. The Yankees idea
of political action assumed a popular democracy with wide-
spread participation and eager civic interest. To him politics
was the business, the responsibility, the duty of all men. It
was an arena for the realization of moral principles of broad
application — and even, as in the case of temperance and vice
crusades — for the correction of private habits. The immigrant,
by contrast, coming as a rule from a peasant environment and
from autocratic societies with strong feudal survivals, was to-
tally unaccustomed to the active citizen s role . 1 He expected to
be acted on by government, but not to be a political agent him-
self. To him government meant restrictions on personal move-
ment, the arbitrary regulation of life, the inaccessibility of the
law, and the conscription of the able-bodied. To him govern-
ment was the instrument of the ruling classes, characteristically
acting in their interests, which were indifferent or opposed to
his own. Nor was government in his eyes an affair of abstract
principles and rules of law: it was the actions of particular men
with particular powers. Political relations were not governed
by abstract principles; they were profoundly personal . 2

1 1 have drawn here upon the perceptive discussion of the immigrant in
politics by Oscar Handlin: The Uprooted (Boston, 1951), chapter viii.

2 Cf. Henry Cabot Lodge’s complaint that the idea of patriotism — devo-
tion to one’s country — was Roman, while the idea of devotion to the em-
peror as the head of state was Byzantine. It was the Byzantine inheritance,
he said, that the Eastern immigrants were bringing m. Henry Cabot
Lodge: “I mm igration — a Review,” in Philip David, ed.: Immigration and
Americanization (Boston, 1920), p. 55.

The boss’s code of personal loyalty and the reformer’s code of loyalty to
civic ideals could not easily be accommodated, with the consequence that
when the two had dealings with each other there were irreparable misun-

182

THE AGE OF REFORM

Not being reared on the idea of mass participation, the im-
migrant was not especially eager to exercise his vote immedi-
ately upon naturalization. Nor was he interested in such reforms
as the initiative, referendum, and recall, which were intelligible
only from the standpoint of the Anglo-American ethos of popu-
lar political action. When he finally did assume his civic role,
it was either in response to Old World loyalties (which became
a problem only during and after the first World War) or to im-
mediate needs arising out of his struggle for life in the American
city — to his need for a job or charity or protection from the law
or for a street vendor s license. The necessities of American cities
— their need for construction workers, street-cleaners, police and
firemen, service workers of all kinds — often provided him with
his livelihood, as it provided the boss with the necessary patron-
age. The immigrant, in short, looked to politics not for the reali-
zation of high principles but for concrete and personal gains,
and he sought these gains through personal relationships. And
here the boss, particularly the Irish boss, who could see things
from the immigrants angle but could also manipulate the Amer-
ican environment, became a specialist in personal relations and
personal loyalties . 3 The boss himself encouraged the immigrant
to think of politics as a field in which one could legitimately pur-

derstandings. Thus Woodrow Wilson in New Jersey and Joseph Folk in
Missouri were made, respectively. Governor and Attorney General through
agreements with bosses, and both turned on their benefactors, Wilson in
matters of program and patronage, Folk to the extent of a prosecution for
corruption. To bosses Jim Smith and Ed Butler, Wilson and Folk were
ingrates and scoundrels. But in their own minds the reformers were justi-
fied m placing civic ideals and public commitments over and above mere
personal obligations.

3 Ross reported the words of a New England reformer: “The Germans
want to know which candidate is better qualified for the office. Among the
Irish I have never heard such a consideration mentioned. They ask, ‘Who
wants this candidate?* Who is behind him?* I have lined up a good many
Irish in support of Good Government men, but never by setting forth the
merits of a matter or a candidate. I approach my Irish friends with the
personal appeal, ‘Do this for me!* ” The Old World in the New, p. 262.

Later, as new immigrant groups became more Americanized, they began
to resent the Irish tendency to monopolize political leadership, and formed
factions of their own, with which the Irish bosses learned to do business.

183

Chapiter v: The Progressive Impulse

sue one’s interests. This was, indeed, his own occupational view
of it: politics was a trade at which a man worked and for which
he should be properly paid. As George Washington Plunkitt,
the sage of Tammany Hall, once said, all the machines were
agreed "on the main proposition that when a man works in
politics, he should get something out of it .” 4 The boss, more-
over, was astute enough to see that the personal interests that
were pursued in politics must be construed broadly enough to
include self-respect. Where the reformers and Americanizers
tried to prod the immigrant toward the study of American ways,
the boss contented himself with studying the immigrant’s ways,
attending his weddings and christenings (with appropriate
gifts ) and his funerals, and making himself a sympathetic ob-
server of immigrant life and in a measure a participant in it.
Reformers might try on occasion to compete with this, but they
lacked the means. The boss, rich with graft, could afford to be
more generous, and having doled out many a favor to business-
men, he could draw upon the world of private business as well
as the public payroll to provide jobs for his constituents. Where
reformers identified patriotism with knowledgeable civic action
and self-denial, the bosses were satisfied to confine it to party
regularity, and they were not embarrassed by a body of litera-
ture purporting to show that to trade one’s vote for personal
services was a form of civic iniquity.

While the boss, with his pragmatic talents and his immediate
favors, quickly appealed to the immigrant, the reformer was a
mystery. Often he stood for things that to the immigrant were
altogether bizarre, like women’s rights and Sunday laws, or
downright insulting, like temperance. His abstractions had no
appeal within the immigrant’s experience — citizenship, responsi-
bility, efficiency, good government, economy, businesslike man-
agement. The immigrant wanted humanity, not efficiency, and

4 William L. Riordan: Plunkitt of Tammany Hall , ed. by Roy V. Peel
(New York, 1948), p. 52. This work, which consists of a record of
Plimkitt’s utterances, was originally published m 1905. It is instructive to
set its basic assumptions alongside those of the reformers.

184

THE AGE OF REFORM

economies threatened to lop needed jobs off the payroll. The
reformer s attacks upon the boss only caused the immigrant to
draw closer to his benefactor. Progressives, in return, re-
proached the immigrant for having no interest in broad princi-
ples, in the rule of law or the public good. Between the two, for
the most part, the channels of effective communication were
closed. Progressive reform drew its greatest support from the
more discontented of the native Americans, and on some issues
from the rural and small-town constituencies that surrounded
the great cities. The insulation of the Progressive from the sup-
port of the most exploited sector of the population was one of
the factors that, for all his humanitarianism, courage, and vis-
ion, reduced the social range and the radical drive of his pro-
gram and kept him genteel, proper, and safe.

On some issues, to be sure, especially those, like workmen’s
compensation, that bore directly on the welfare of the working
population, the bosses themselves saw areas of agreement with
the reformers. The reformer could preach and agitate over such
questions and the machines would help him legislate. Indeed,
it was one of the classic urban machine politicians, A1 Smith,
who made the first effectual bridge between the humanity of
the reformers and the humanity of the bosses. But this tendency,
which Smith brought to consummation only during his post-
war governorship of New York, was of slow development in the
Progressive era itself. The uneasy and partial but occasionally
effective union between the idealistic reformer and the boss
foreshadowed only vaguely a development that was to reach its
peak under Franklin D. Roosevelt. 5

5 Nothing I have said in the text should be taken to imply that the
urban machines based upon immigrant support were the first or only ones
to develop a spirit of political participation based upon the economics of
self-interest. Of course the whole nineteenth-century sectional-interest
scramble, with its tariff trading and its pork-barrel procedures, would belie
any such notion, and it is worth adding that this political tradition was
represented by Anglo-Saxon politicians, many of them with rural back-
grounds. The notion that politics should be an area for high-minded and
disinterested service was revived (it was by no means new m America

185

Chapter v: The Progressive Impulse

n. Muckraking: the Revolution in Journalism

To an extraordinary degree the work of the Progressive move-
ment rested upon its journalism. The fundamental critical
achievement, of American Progressivism was the business of
exposure, and journalism was the chief occupational source of
its creative writers. It is hardly >an exaggeration to say that the
Progressive mind was characteristically a journalistic mind, and
that its characteristic contribution was that of the socially re-
sponsible reporter-reformer. The muckraker was a central figure.
Before there could be action, there must be information and
exhortation. Grievances had to be given specific objects, and
these the muckraker supplied. It was muckraking that brought
the diffuse malaise of the public into focus.

The practice of exposure itself was not an invention of the
muckraking era, nor did muckraking succeed because it had a
new idea to offer. The pervasiveness of graft, the presence of a
continuous corrupt connection between business and govern-
ment, the link between government and vice — there was noth-
ing new in the awareness of these things. Since the 1870’s, ex-
posure had been a recurrent theme in American political life.
There had been frequent local newspaper crusades. Henry
Adams and his brother Charles Francis had muckraked the Erie

among them) by the Mugwump idealists of the late nineteenth century.
After them it became a creed with a much broader following during the
Progressive era. I have singled out, as a phenomenon of the Progressive era,
the antipathy between the ethos of the boss-machme-immigrant complex
and that of the reformer-mdividuahst-Anglo-Saxon complex not because I
hold it to be the only struggle going on at the time but because it serves as
an archetypical illustration of undercurrents of political feeling that were
then begmning to be of especial importance. (For later developments m
this line see chapter vn, section 2. ) We need more studies of the types of
political organizations that have flourished m the United States and of the
codes of loyalties they have developed to sustain them. Such studies would
concern themselves with at least five major variants: not only the immi-
grant machines and the reform movements, but the durable reform ma-
chines, the native interest-politics machines of the mid-nineteenth century,
and the modes of government developed by the interlocking local elites of
the middle and late eighteenth century.

186

THE AGE OF REFORM

ring and the "Gold Conspiracy”; the New York Times, Harpers
Weekly, and Thomas Nast had gone after Tammany in the sev-
enties. There had been a great deal of exposure in the nineties,
when Parkhurst and the Lexow Committee were active in New
York, and W. T. Stead’s If Christ Came to Chicago had caused a
sensation in that city. Henry Demarest Lloyd’s Wealth against
Commonwealth , published in 1894, was a brilliant piece of
muckraking. Hamlin Garland’s Populist novel, A Spoil of Office,
showed how general was the familiarity with state corruption.
Indeed, during the last three decades of the nineteenth century,
literally dozens upon dozens of novels were published which
have been designated, because of their concentration upon cor-
ruption, "premuckraking” novels. 6

What was new in muckraking in the Progressive era was
neither its ideas nor its existence, but its reach — its nationwide
character and its capacity to draw nationwide attention, the
presence of mass muckraking media with national circulations,
and huge resources for the research that went into exposure.
The muckraking magazines had circulations running into the
hundreds of thousands. They were able to pour funds into the
investigations of their reporters — S. S. McClure estimated that
the famous articles of Ida Tarbell cost $4,000 each and those of
Lincoln Steffens $2,000 7 — and they were able, as very few of the
practitioners of exposure had been able before, not merely to
name the malpractices in American business and politics, but
to name the malpractitioners and their specific misdeeds, and to
proclaim the facts to the entire country. It now became possible
for any literate citizen to know what barkeepers, district at-
torneys, ward heelers, prostitutes, police-court magistrates, re-
porters, and corporation lawyers had always come to know in
the course of their business.

Behind muckraking there was a long history of change in

6 John Lydenberg: Premuckraking, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Harvard
University, 1946.

7 S. S. McClure: My Autobiography (New York, 1914), p. 245.

187

Chapter v: The Progressive Impulse

journalism, the story of a transformation in the newspaper and
magazine world. The immensely rapid urbanization of the
country had greatly enlarged daily newspaper circulation. In
1870 there were 574 daily newspapers in the country; by 1899
there were 1,610; by 1909, 2,600. 8 The circulation of daily news-
papers increased over the same span of time from 2,800,000
to 24,200,000. 9 This expansion had opened up to publishers re-
markable promotional opportunities, which brought in their
train a number of changes in journalistic practice.

The newspaper owners and editors soon began to assume
a new role. Experienced in the traditional function of reporting
the news, they found themselves undertaking the more ambitious
task of creating a mental world for the uprooted farmers and
villagers who were coming to live in the city. The rural migrants
found themselves in a new urban world, strange, anonymous,
impersonal, cruel, often corrupt and vicious, but also full of
variety and fascination. They were accustomed to a life based
on primary human contacts — the family, the church, the neigh-
borhood — and they had been torn away from these and thrust
into a more impersonal environment, in which they experienced
a much larger number of more superficial human relationships.
The newspaper became not only the interpreter of this environ-
ment but a means of surmounting in some measure its vast
human distances, of supplying a sense of intimacy all too rare
in the ordinary course of its life. Through newspaper gossip it
provided a substitute for village gossip. It began to make in-
creased use of the variety and excitement of the city to capture
personal interest and offer its readers indirect human contacts. 1
The rural mind, confronted with the city, often responded with
shock, and this too the newspaper did not hesitate to exploit.
So one finds during the seventies, eighties, and nineties an in-

8 Alfred McClung Lee: The Daily Newspaper in America (New York,
1937), pp. 716-17.

9 Ibid., pp 725-6.

1 See Helen MacGill Hughes: News and the Human Interest Story
(Chicago, 1940).

188

THE AGE OF REFORM

creasing disposition on the part of editors to use the human-in-
terest story, the crusade, the interview, and the stunt or promo-
tional device to boom circulation. The large newspaper with a
growing circulation became less dependent upon the political
party. There were more politically independent or quasi-inde-
pendent papers, and publishers felt more inclined to challenge
the political parties and other institutions. In business terms the
benefits to booming circulation of crusades and exposes far out-
stripped the dangers from possible retaliation. In an age when
news was at a premium and when more and more copy was
needed to surround the growing columns of advertisement,
there was a tendency for publishers and editors to be dissatisfied
with reporting the news and to attempt to make it. The papers
made news in a double sense; they created reportable events,
whether by sending Nelly Bly around the world or by helping to
stir up a war with Spain. They also elevated events, hitherto
considered beneath reportorial attention, to the level of news
occurrences by clever, emotionally colored reporting. They
exploited human interest, in short This was something that had
existed almost from the beginning of the popular penny press —
one remembers, for instance, the elder James Gordon Bennett’s
capacity to exploit his own flamboyant personality. But the new
exploitation of human interest was different. There was more
of it, of course, and it was more skillfully done, but, most symp-
tomatic, there was a change in its character. Where the old hu-
man interest had played up the curious concern of the common
citizen with the affairs and antics of the rich, the new human
interest exploited far more intensely the concern of comfortable
people with the affairs of the poor. The slum sketch, the story
of the poor and disinherited of the cities, became common-
place . 2 And it was just this interest of the secure world in the
nether world that served as the prototype of muckraking.

2 The modern newspaper reader often shrinks from the vulgarity and
sentimentality of sob-sister journalism. While the manifest function of such
writing, however, may be to exploit sentiment for the sake of sales, its

189

Chapter v: The Progressive Impulse

All this concern with news, interviews, exposure, and human
interest set a premium on the good reporter and reduced the im-
portance of editorial writing and the editorial page. As early as
1871 a writer on journalism observed: “For the majority of read-
ers it is the reporter, not the editor, who is the ruling genius of
the newspaper.” 3 The old editors of the pre-Civil War era had
put a great deal of stock in themselves as makers of opinion
through their editorial columns. Now their successors began to
realize that their influence on the public mind, such as it was,
came from their treatment of the news, not from editorial writ-
ing. But getting the news, especially when it came to exposes
and human-interest stories, was the reporters business. Bold
reportorial initiative, good reportorial writing, were now very
much in demand. In the period from 1870 to about 1890 the
salaries of reporters doubled. Better-educated men were more
attracted to the profession and were more acceptable in it. 4
Editors who had scorned college graduates began to look for
them. The Spanish- American War, a triumph of the new jour-
nalism, was nowhere fought more brilliantly than in the columns
of the newspapers, and it was covered by a battery of reporters
numerous enough and well enough equipped to be used in
emergency as military reinforcements. As the reporter s job rose
in status, even in glamour, more and more young men with
serious literary aspirations were attracted to it as a provisional
way of earning a living. These men brought to the journalistic
life some of the ideals, the larger interests, and the sense of
public responsibility of men of culture.

latent function is to help create an urban ethos of solidarity and to put
some limits on the barbanzation of urban life. No American newspaper-
reader can fail to notice the widespread generous response that is given
almost every day to some widely publicized personal disaster. Even a dig-
nified newspaper like the New York Times taps this generosity each year
by raising funds for chanty on the basis of poignantly written accounts of
the city's “Hundred Neediest Cases.” A civilization that needs sob-sister
journalism is a sad one, but the same civilization incapable of producmg
it would be worse.

3 Frank Luther Mott: American Journalism (New York, 1947), p. 885.

4 Ibid., pp. 488-90.

190

THE AGE OF REFORM

Finally, the occupational situation of the reporter was
uniquely illuminating. It was not merely that reporters saw and
heard things, got the inside story; they sat at the crossroads be-
tween the coarse realities of their reportorial beats and the high
abstractions and elevated moral tone of the editorial page. Re-
porters saw what fine things the newspapers said about public
responsibility, and they also saw the gross things newspaper
managers did to get news or advertising. As Theodore Dreiser,
then a young reporter, recalled, they became alert to hypocrisy,
perhaps a little cynical themselves, but fundamentally en-
lightened about the immense gaps between the lofty ideals and
public professions of the editorial page and the dirty realities
of the business office and the newsroom. 5 And it was into this
gap that the muckraking mind rushed with all its fact-finding
zeal.

It was, of course, the popular magazine, not the daily news-
paper, that stood in the forefront of muckraking, but the muck-
raking periodicals were profoundly affected by newspaper
journalism. The old, respectable magazines, the Atlantic ,
Harpers , the Century , and Scribners , had been genteel, sedate
enterprises selling at thirty-five cents a copy and reaching
limited audiences of about 130,000. These periodicals were run
by literary men; implicit in their contents was the notion that
the magazine is a book in periodical form; they were managed
by the conservative publishing houses. The new magazines that

5 “While the editorial office might be preparing the most flowery moral-
istic or religionistic editorials regarding the worth of man, the value of
progress, character, religion, morality, the sanctity of the home, charity,
and the like, the business office and news room were concerned with no
such fine theories. The busmess office was all business, with little or no
thought of anything save success, and in the city news room the mask was
off and life was handled in a rough-and-ready manner, without gloves.

. . . Pretense did not go here. Innate honesty on the part of any one was
not probable. Chanty was a business with something m it for somebody.
Morality was m the main for public consumption only.” Theodore Dreiser:
A Book about Myself (New York, 1922), pp. 151-2. Thus the newspaper
itself provided a model for the Progressive dissociation of morals and
“reality.”

191

Chapter v: The Progressive Impulse

emerged at the turn of the century sold at ten or twelve or
fifteen cents a copy and reached audiences of from 400,000 to
1,000,000. Their publishers were not literary men but business
promoters; their editors were usually former newspaper editors,
and they ran a good deal of news copy written by reporters.
These magazines, by contrast, were newspapers in periodical
form; they took many of their ideas from daily journalism or the
Sunday supplements. They contained not only literature but
features that resembled news. And like the daily press they soon
began to make news and to become a political force in their own
right.

As businessmen, the publishers of these magazines, Frank
Munsey, S. S. McClure, John Brisben Walker, and others, re-
sembled their promotion-minded forerunners in daily journalism
like E. W. Scripps, Joseph Pulitzer, and William Randolph
Hearst. Muckracking for them was the most successful of the
circulation-building devices they used. Neither the muckraking
publishers and editors nor the muckraking reporters set out to
expose evils or to reform society. Although the experience of
the Ladies * Home Journal , Munsey s, and the Saturday Evening
Post showed that immense circulations could be achieved with-
out ever entering in any serious sense upon it, muckraking was
a by-product, perhaps an inevitable one, of the development of
mass magazines. Even McClure's , the magazine that touched off
the movement, had already built a large circulation upon an
enterprising use of popular fiction and upon Ida TarbelTs series
on the lives of Napoleon and Lincoln. The so-called “muckrak-
ing” magazines themselves devoted only a small proportion of
their total space to muckraking articles. Only after exposure
had proved its popularity did other magazines, notably Hamp-
tons, boom their circulations by focusing on muckraking.

A significant illustration of the accidental sources of muck-
raking was Miss TarbelTs famous series on Standard Oil. S. S.
McClure was running, during the late 1890’s, a series of articles
which he describes in his autobiography as dedicated to “the

192

THE AGE OF REFORM

greatest American business achievements/’ He had observed
that the “feeling of the common people [about the trusts] had
a sort of menace in it; they took a threatening attitude toward
the Trusts, and without much knowledge .” 6 He and his editors
decided that a study of Standard Oil, the greatest of the trusts,
would have some educational value, and they called in Ida
Tarbell, who 'had lived for years in the heart of the oil region
of Pennsylvania, and had seen the marvelous development of
the Standard Oil Trust at first hand ” 7 It happened also that
Miss Tarbell, whose family had suffered the common disastrous
fate of the independent oil-producers, had a great feeling for
them . 8 The methods that had been used by Standard Oil
were altogether too vulnerable to be played down, and although
she hoped her inquiry “might be received as a legitimate histori-
cal study ... to my chagrin I found myself included in a new
school, that of the muckrakers.” She decided that she would
have done with the whole business and seems to have resented
the demand of some of her following that she go on with the
work of exposure — “I soon found that most of them wanted at-
tacks. They had little interest in balanced findings.” 9 Later she
did some further work in exposing tariff politics, but she after-
wards recalled: “My conscience began to trouble me. Was it not
as much my business as a reporter to present this [the favorable]
side of the picture as to present the other?” “The public was
coming to believe,” she felt, as a result of all the work of ex-
posure, “that the inevitable result of corporate industrial man-
agement was exploitation, neglect, bullying, crushing of labor,
that the only hope was in destroying the system.” So she began
to write about achievements and improvements in business —
under the considerable handicap, to be sure, of her muckraking
reputation — became a eulogist of business, and eventually wrote

6 S. S. McClure, op. cit., pp, 237-8.

7 Ibid., p. 238,

8 Ida Tarbell: All in the Days Work (New York, 1939), pp. 202 ff.

9 Ibid., p. 242,

193

Chapter v: The Progressive Impulse

an apologetic biography of the industrialist Judge Gary . 1 In her
case the impulse that had been expressed by McClure when he
first set out to publicize business achievements came full circle.

Most of the other outstanding figures of the muckrake era
were simply writers or reporters working on commission and
eager to do well what was asked of them. A few, among them
Upton Sinclair and Gustavus Myers, were animated by a deep-
going dislike of the capitalist order, but most of them were
hired into muckraking or directed toward it on the initiative of
sales-conscious editors or publishers. Probably the most socially
minded and inquisitive of the muckrakers, except for the
Socialists, was Lincoln Steffens; but even his muckraking of
American cities began more or less accidentally when McClure
refused to allow him to take over an editorship without getting
out and familiarizing himself with the country . 2 Others were
reluctant dragons. Ray Stannard Baker, whose chief desire was
to be a novelist, came to McClure 9 s as a writer of secret-service
stories and of a book celebrating America’s prosperity. Before he
began muckraking he was writing faintly eulogistic articles on
big business and the trusts! It is perhaps a significant token of
the way in which memory rearranges facts in the light of myth
that many years later, when Louis Filler was writing his study
of the muckrakers, Baker could — no doubt sincerely — refer him
to these pieces as examples of early muckraking articles. In fact
Baker’s first muckraking work tended in a far different direction
— it showed up abuses in labor-unionism. Thomas Lawson, the
author of the popular Frenzied Finance , was a bruised specu-
lator with a bitter contempt for popular democracy . 3 David
Graham Phillips, who wrote The Treason of the Senate , was
making large sums writing novels for the Saturday Evening
Post when Bailey Millard, the editor of the Cosmopolitan , talked
him into writing the attack on the Senate. Phillips was extremely

1 Ibid., chapter xiv, pp. 364 ff.

2 Lincoln Steffens: Autobiography , p. 364.

s C. C. Regier; The Era of the Muckrakers (Chapel Hill, 1932), p. 130.

194

THE AGE OF REFORM

reluctant at first, insisting that someone else be engaged to
“gather the facts/’ and agreed to undertake the work only when
Gustavus Myers, the Socialist writer, was hired to do the re-
search. Once engaged upon the task, however, he developed a
real interest in it.

If, from the standpoint of the editors and journalists them-
selves, the beginning of muckraking seemed to be more or less
"accidental,” its ending did not. The large magazine built on
muckracking was vulnerable as a business organization. The
publishing firm was so large an enterprise and sold its product
for so litde that it became intensely dependent upon advertis-
ing and credit, and hence vulnerable to pressure from the busi-
ness community. Advertisers did not hesitate to withdraw orders
for space when their own interests or related interests were
touched upon. Bankers adopted a discriminatory credit policy,
so that modest loans could not be secured even for the main-
tenance of a business of great value and proved stability. In
one case, that of Hamptons , even espionage was employed to
destroy the magazine. 4 One magazine, Pearsons , continued to
muckrake after 1912, when all the others had fallen into new
hands or changed their policies, and its vitality, sustained down
to the time of the first World War, has been cited as evidence
that muckraking sentiment did not die a spontaneous death, but
was choked off at its sources by those who were most affected
by its exposures. 5 This is a suggestive, but to my mind not a con-
clusive, point. It is conceivable that there may have been enough
muckraking sentiment left to support one well-run periodical

4 For accounts of the decline of muckraking, see Louis Filler: Crusaders
for American Liberalism (New York, 1939), chapter xxviii, and C. C.
Regier, op. cit., chapter xii.

5 Filler, op. cit., pp. 370-3. The whole subject of the decline of muck-
raking deserves a full-length study of its own, centering not simply on the
resistance of the busmess community but on such factors as popular mood
and the internal business and promotional methods of the magazines them-
selves. In the latter connection see Walter A. Gaw: Some Important Trends
in the Development of Magazines in the United States as an Advertising
Medium , unpublished doctoral dissertation, New York University, 1942.

195

Chapter Vi The Progressive Impulse

with a large circulation, but not a half-dozen plus a large num-
ber of smaller imitators. Certainly business was hostile and
made its hostility felt, but it also seems that the muckraking
mood was tapering off. By 1912 it had been raging at a high
pitch for nine years. To imagine that it could have gone on in-
definitely is to mistake its character.

Consider who the muckrakers were, what their intentions
were, and what it was they were doing. Their criticisms of
American society were, in their utmost reaches, very searching
and radical, but they were themselves moderate men who in-
tended to propose no radical remedies. From the beginning,
then, they were limited by the disparity between the boldness
of their means and the tameness of their ends. They were work-
ing at a time of widespread prosperity, and their chief appeal
was not to desperate social needs but to mass sentiments of
responsibility, indignation, and guilt. Hardly anyone intended
that these sentiments should result in action drastic enough to
transform American society. In truth, that society was getting
along reasonably well, and the muckrakers themselves were
quite aware of it. The group of leading muckrakers that left
McClures in 1906 to form the American Magazine* as Ray
Stannard Baker recalled, was “far more eager to understand and
make sure than to dream of utopias. . . . We muckraked’ not
because we hated our world but because we loved it. We were
not hopeless, we were not cynical, we were not bitter." 7 Their
first announcement promised “the most stirring and delightful
monthly book of fiction, humor, sentiment, and joyous reading
that is anywhere published. It will reflect a happy, struggling,
fighting world, in which, as we believe, good people are coming
out on top. . . . Our magazine will be wholesome, hopeful,
stimulating, uplifting. ..." 8

6 Most of the principals have left this incident obscure in their memoirs.
The most informative acount is that of Ida Tarbell, op. cit., pp. 256-7 ; c£
Steffens: Autobiography, pp. 535-6.

7 Ray Stannard Baker: American Chronicle (New York, 1945), p. 226.

8 Ibid., pp. 226-7. Cf. Miss TarbelTs recollection that the American

196

THE AGE OF REFORM

Finally, it is perhaps necessary to point out that within the
limited framework of the reforms that were possible without
structural alterations in the American social and economic sys-
tem, the muckrakers did accomplish something in the form of
legislative changes and social face-washing. They enjoyed, after
all, some sense of real achievement. Presumably the temper of
the early writers for McClures was far more akin to that of the
majority of their middle-class audience than was the attitude of
the Socialist muckrakers like Gustavus Myers, Upton Sinclair,
and Charles Edward Russell, who wanted to push the implica-
tions of muckraking discoveries to their utmost practical con-
clusions.

m. Reality and Responsibility

The muckrakers had a more decisive impact on the thinking of
the country than they did on its laws or morals. They confirmed,
if they did not create, a fresh mode of criticism that grew out of
journalistic obseivation. The dominant note in the best thought
of the Progressive era is summed up in the term “realism.” It
was realism that the current literature and journalism fostered,
just as it was realism that the most fertile thinkers of the age
brought into philosophy, law, and economics. Although Western
sectional consciousness, which was curiously united to a sort of
folkish nationalism, made its own contribution, to realistic writ-

Magazine “had little genuine muckrakng spirit. . . . The idea that there
was something fundamentally sound and good m industrial relations, that
in many spots had gone far beyond what either labor or reformers were
demanding, came to the office as a new attack on the old problem/' Op.
cit, p. 281. “It seems to me,” wrote William Allen White, another member
of the group, to editor John S Phillips m 1906, “the great danger before
you is that of being too purposeful. People will expect the pale drawn face;
the set lips and a general line of emotional insanity. You should fool 'em.
Give 'em something like Tigs is Pigs/ From the prospectus they will judge
that you are going to produce a Thin red line of heroes,' and instead of
which you should have the sharp claque of the slap stick. . . /' Walter
Johnson: William Allen White’s America (New York, 1947), p. 159.

197

Chapter v: The Progressive Impulse

ing, the chief source of realism lay in the city and city journal-
ism. With few exceptions the makers of American realism, even
from the days of Mark Twain and William Dean Howells, were
men who had training in journalistic observation — Stephen
Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Harold Frederic, David Graham
Philhps — or men like Edward Kirkland, Edward Eggleston,
Hamlin Garland, and Jack London who in some other capacity
had also seen the rough side of life to which the reporters and
human-interest writers were exposed. What they all had in com-
mon — the realistic novelists, the muckrakers, and the more
critical social scientists of the period — was a passion for getting
the “inside story.”

Robert Cantwell once suggested that the primary reason for
the success of the muckrakers was not political at all, but
literary, and that their work was in a sense the journalistic
equivalent of the literary realism that also flourished at the time.
It had never been customary in America to write about America,
but especially not about the life of industry and labor and busi-
ness and poverty and vice. Now, while novelists were replacing
a literature bred out of other literature with a genre drawn from
street scenes and abattoirs or the fly-specked rural kitchens of
Hamlin Garland's stories, the muckrakers were replacing the
genteel travel stories and romances of the older magazines with
a running account of how America worked. “It was not,” says
Cantwell, “because the muckrakers exposed the corruption of
Minneapolis, for example, that they were widely read, but be-
cause they wrote about Minneapolis at a time when it had not
been written about, without patronizing or boosting it, and with
an attempt to explore its life realistically and intelligently.
They wrote, in short, an intimate, anecdotal, behind-the-scenes
history of their own times. . . . They traced the intricate re-
lationship of the police, the underworld, the local political
bosses, die secret connections between the new corporations
♦ . . and the legislatures and the courts. In doing this they drew
a new cast of characters for the drama of American society:

198

THE AGE OF REFORM

bosses, professional politicians, reformers, racketeers, captains
of industry. Everybody recognized these native types; every-
body knew about them; but they had not been characterized
before; their social functions had not been analyzed. At the
same time, the muckrakers pictured stage settings that every-
body recognized but that nobody had written about — oil re-
fineries, slums, the red-light districts, the hotel rooms where
political deals were made — the familiar, unadorned, homely
stages where the teeming day-to-day dramas of American life
were enacted. How could the aloof literary magazines of the
East, with their essays and their contributions from distin-
guished English novelists, tap this rich material?” 9

What the muckrakers and the realistic writers were doing in
their fields the speculative thinkers and social scientists were
also doing in theirs. As scholars reached out for their own
‘realistic” categories, the formalistic thought of an earlier and
more conservative generation fell under close and often damag-
ing scrutiny. Economists were pondering Veblen’s effort to re-
place the economic man of the classical school with his waste-
ful consumer and his predatory captain of industry. Legal
realists were supplanting the “pure” jurisprudential agent of
earlier legal theorists with the flesh-and-blood image of the
corporation lawyer dressed in judicial robes and stuffed with
corporation prejudices. Political scientists were losing their old
veneration for the state as an abstract repository of something
called sovereignty and accepting the views of men like Charles
A. Beard and Arthur F. Bentley, who conceived of the state as
a concrete instrument that registered the social pressures
brought to bear upon it by various interest groups. Historians
were beginning to apply the economic interpretation of history.
The new discipline of sociology, intimately linked with social-
settlement work and Christian social reform, was criticizing the
older notions of individuality and morality and developing a

9 Robert Cantwell- “Journalism — the Magazines,” in Harold E. Steams,
ed.: America Now (New York, 1938), p. 347.

199

Chapter v: The Progressive Impulse

new, "realistic” social psychology. John Dewey was attacking
formalistic categories in philosophy and trying to develop a
more descriptive and operational account of the uses of ideas. 1
The supreme achievement of this pervasive iconoclasm came in
1913 with Charles A. Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the
Constitution of the United States , a book that scandalized the
conservative world. This consummatory attack on the traditional
symbols had now carried the Progressive mind to the inner cita-
del of the established order: a nation of Constitution- worship-
pers and ancestor-worshippers was confronted with a scholarly
muckraking of the Founding Fathers and the Constitution itself.
V. L. Parrington, himself a representative of Populist and Pro-
gressive thinking, once suggested that the "chief contribution
of the Progressive movement to American political thought was
its discovery of the essentially undemocratic nature of the
federal constitution.” 2

But Beard's treatment of the Founding Fathers also shows
some of the limitations of the Progressive conception of reality.
When he wrote about the economic interests and activities of
the Founding Fathers, especially those activities related to
politics in a way not always above question from the highest
standards of disinterested morality, he wrote fully and with
illumination. When he dealt with their ideas about democracy,
he was relatively casual; his mind did not become fully engaged
with his object, and he was content with a spare and rather
literal-minded compound of scattered quotations from the
debates in the Constitutional Convention. 3 The muckraking
model of thought had brought with it a certain limiting and
narrowing definition of reality and a flattening of the imagina-

1 On the intellectual achievement of this generation see Morton G.
White. Social Thought in America (New York, 1949), esp. chapter ii.

2 In his Introduction to J Allen Smith Growth and Decadence of Con-
stitutional Government (New York, 1930), p xi.

8 I have dealt with this problem at greater length in ‘ Beard and the
Constitution,” American Quarterly , Vol. II (Fall 1950), pp. 195-213, the
same essay is m Howard IC. Beale, ed.: Charles A. Beard (Lexington, Ky.,
1954), pp. 75-92.

200

THE AGE OF REFORM

tion. William Dean Howells, in one of his less fortunate remarks,
had accepted the earlier tendency of American literature to deal
with “the smiling aspects of life” that were more character-
istically American. This complacency the realists reversed with
a vengeance. Reality now was rough and sordid. It was hidden,
neglected, and off-stage. It was conceived essentially as that
stream of external and material events which was most likely to
be unpleasant . 4 Reality was the bribe, the rebate, the bought
franchise, the sale of adulterated food. It was what one found in
The Jungle , The Octopus , Wealth against Commonwealth , or
The Shame of the Cities . It was just as completely and hope-
lessly dissociated from the world of morals and ideals as, say, a
newspaper editorial on Motherhood might be from the facts
about infant mortality in the slums.

To the average American of the Progressive era this ugly
thing that presented itself as reality was not a final term. Reality
was a series of unspeakable plots, personal iniquities, moral
failures, which, in their totality, had come to govern American
society only because the citizen had relaxed his moral vigilance.
The failures of American society were thus no token of the
ultimate nature of man, of the human condition, much less the
American condition; they were not to be accepted or merely
modified, but fought with the utmost strenuosity at every point.
First reality must in its fullness be exposed, and then it must be
made the subject of moral exhortation; and then, when individ-
ual citizens in sufficient numbers had stiffened in their deter-
mination to effect reform, something could be done. As Josiah
Strong put it: “If public opinion is educated concerning a given
reform — political, social, industrial, or moral — and if the popu-
lar conscience is sufficiently awake to enforce an enlightened
public opinion, the reform is accomplished straightway. This
then is the generic reform — the education of public opinion and

4 Cf. the discussion of “Reality in America” by Lionel Trilling, in The
Liberal Imagination (New York, 1950), pp. 3-21.

201

Chapter v: The Progressive Impulse

of the popular conscience.” 6 First the citizen must reclaim the
power that he himself had abdicated, refashioning where neces-
sary the instruments of government. Then— since the Yankee
found the solution to everything in laws — he must see that the
proper remediable laws be passed and that existing laws be en-
forced. He must choose men of the highest moral qualities for
his political leaders. It was assumed that such moral qualities
were indestructible and that decent men, once found and in-
stalled in office, would remain decent. When they had regained
control of affairs, moral rigor would not flag again.

An excellent illustration of the spirit of Progressivism as it
manifested itself in the new popular literature is provided by a
famous editorial by S. S. McClure in the January 1903 issue of
McClure's. 6 In this editorial McClure stood back and took a
fresh look at his publication and suddenly realized what it was
that he and his writers were doing. He observed that his cur-
rent issue, which was running an article muckraking Minneapo-
lis by Lincoln Steffens, another on Standard Oil by Ida Tarbell,
and still another by Ray Stannard Baker on labor, showed a
striking and completely unplanned convergence upon a central
fact in American life: a general disrespect for law on the
part of capitalists, workingmen, politicians, and citizens. Who,
he asked, was left in the community to uphold the law? The
lawyers? Some of the best of them made a living from ad-
vising business firms how to evade it. The judges? Among too
many of them the respect for law took the form of respect for
quibbles by which they restored to liberty men who on the evi-
dence of common sense would be convicted of malfeasances. The
churches? "We know of one, an ancient and wealthy establish-
ment, which had to be compelled by a Tammany hold-over
health officer to put its tenements in sanitary condition.” "The

6 Josiah Strong, op. cit , p 159.

6 1 have chosen not only this editorial from McClure’s, but that periodi-
cal's contents during this whole era as bemg completely representative
of the average magazine-reader's fare, and of the thought and sensibility
of the muckraking movement.

202

THE AGE OF REFORM

colleges? They do not understand.” “There is no one left,” con-
cluded McClure, “none but all of us. . . . We all are doing our
worst and making the public pay. The public is the people. We
forget that we all are the people. . . . We have to pay in the
end, every one of us.”

The chief themes of the muckraking magazines are stated
here. First is the progressive view of reality — evil-doing among
the most respectable people is seen as the “real” character of
American life; corruption is found on every side. Second is the
idea that the mischief can be interpreted simply as a widespread
breaking of the law. I have remarked that Anglo-Saxon thinking
emphasized governance by legal rules, as opposed to the wide-
spread tendency among immigrants to interpret political reality
in the light of personal relations. If the laws are the right laws,
and if they can be enforced by the right men, the Progressive be-
lieved, everything would be better . 7 He had a great and abiding

7 “In brief, so long as the trust question is a question of law, the people
may feel as the President does, that it is safe m clean, steady hands and a
loyal, legal mmd.” L. A Coolidge. “Attorney-General Knox, Lawyer,”
McClures , Vol XIX (September 1902), p 473.

“. . . the dull indifference of the people. They do not insist that the
laws be enforced.” S. S McClure. “The Increase of Lawlessness m the
United States,” ibid., Vol. XXIV (December 1904), p. 163.

“The only remedy is a strict enforcement of all tire laws, all along the
line, all the time . . Ray Stannard Baker: “What Is a Lynching?” ibid.
(February 1905), p. 430.

“. . . a failure to observe the elementary principles of law . . .” Bur-
ton J. Hendrick: “Governor Hughes,” ibid., Vol. XXX (April 1908), p.
681.

“I would hke to see all saloons legislated out of existence . . “The
Story of an Alcohol Slave,” ibid., Vol. XXXIII (August 1909), p. 430.

. . my chief constructive work was devoted to securing a system by
which I could compel the body of men under me — against its old custom
and obvious self-interest — really to enforce the law.” General Theodore A.
Bmgham: “The Organized Criminals of New York,” ibid., Vol. XXXIV
(November 1909), p. 62.

This was one of the points at which the more sophisticated thinking of
the era deviated most sharply from common discourse, for while the Pro-
gressive moralists and popular exhorters were demanding a return to the
law,” conceived as a glittering abstraction, writers hke Charles A. Beard,
Arthur F. Bentley, and Frank J. Goodnow were trying to show that law
too is responsive to political pressures and that it reflects class interests.

203

Chapter v: The Progressive Impulse

faith in the appeal to such abstractions as the law and patriot-
ism, and the efficacy of continued exhortation. Third, there was
the appeal to universal personal responsibility and the imputa-
tion of personal guilt.

To understand the reform mentality, we must consider the
vigor with which the Progressives attacked not only such social
questions as the powers of trusts and bosses, but also such ob-
jects of reform as the liquor traffic and prostitution. The Pro-
gressive mind, I have said, was pre-eminently a Protestant mind;
and even though much of its strength was in the cities, it in-
herited the moral traditions of rural evangelical Protestantism.
The Progressives were still freshly horrified by phenomena that
we now resignedly consider indigenous to urban existence.
However prosperous they were, they lived in the midst of all the
iniquities that the agrarian myth had taught them to expect of
urban life, and they refused to accept them calmly. Here it was
that a most important aspect of the Protestant personality came
into play: its ethos of personal responsibility. American life and
American mythology had been keyed to the conditions of rural
simplicity and village neighborliness under which personal re-
sponsibility for the problems — and the morals — of others could
in fact often be assumed . 8 Moreover it was the whole effect of
the Protestant ethic to heighten the sense of personal responsi-
bility as much as possible. The more the muckrakers acquainted
the Protestant Yankee with what was going on around him, the

8 E. A. Ross wrote a very popular book, Sin and Society (Boston, 1907),
whose entire purpose was to show how the new conditions of life de-
manded a new code of morality. Sinning — the commission of evil acts
harmful to others — had become corporate and impersonal. The characteris-
tic wrong arose not out of aggression but from betrayal. Usually it was
committed by men who were entirely virtuous m private and personal rela-
tionships, for the chief problem now was not the evil impulse itself but
moral insensibility. The modem sinners could not see the results of their
own acts because these would be remote in time and space. Therefore it
was necessary to become ever so much more imaginative than formerly m
appraising one’s own sms and those of others. Among other things, direc-
tors of companies should be held personally accountable for every pre-
ventable abuse committed by their corporations.

204

THE AGE OF REFORM

more guilty and troubled he felt. The religious institutions of
Protestantism provided no mechanism to process, drain off, and
externalize the sense of guilt . 9 American political traditions pro-
vided no strong native tradition of conservatism to reconcile
men to evils that could not easily be disposed of. The native
ethos of mass participation in politics and citizenlike civic
consciousness — so strange, as we have remarked, to the immi-
grants — confirmed the idea that everyone was in some very
serious sense responsible for everything.

Frederic C. Howe’s candid and highly illuminating autobi-
ography, The Confessions of a Reformer , shows with fine self-
awareness how the preachings of evangelical Protestantism and
the civic teachings of Mugwumpery laid the foundations for the
Progressive sense of responsibility. Howe had been raised in
Meadville, Pennsylvania, as the child of moderately well-to-do
and sincerely pious Methodist parents. Attending a small
sectarian college in the great age of secularization that came in
with Darwinism, Howe found himself unable to respond any
longer to evangelical revivalism; but, as he reports, the "morality
of duty, of careful respectability,” that was inculcated in him
from his earliest years was not so easily dislodged as the theol-
ogy that went with it. "Early assumptions as to virtue and vice,
goodness and evil remained in my mind long after I had tried to
discard them. This is, I think, the most characteristic influence
of my generation. It explains the nature of our reforms, the
regulatory legislation in morals and economics, our belief in
men rather than in institutions and our messages to other peo-

9 In evangelical Protestantism the individual is expected to bear almost
the full burden of the conversion and the salvation of his soul. What his
church provides him with, so far as this goal is concerned, is an instrument
of exhortation. In Catholicism, by contrast, as in some other churches, the
mediatmg role of the Church itself is of far greater importance and the
responsibility of the individual is not keyed up to quite the same pitch. A
working mechanism for the disposal and psychic mastery of guilt is avail-
able to Roman Catholics m the form of confession and penance. If this
difference is translated into political terms, the moral animus of Progressiv-
ism can be better understood.

205

Chapter v: The Progressive Impulse

pies. Missionaries and battleships, anti-saloon leagues and
Ku Klux Klans, Wilson and Santo Domingo are all a part of
that evangelistic psychology that makes America what she is.” 1
When Howe went to Johns Hopkins University for graduate
study, he was well prepared to respond to the passionate
preachings of an academic Mugwump like Woodrow Wilson,
who spoke out against the indifference and loss of responsibility
among the public, and to the high-minded addresses of Lord
Bryce, who lamented the spoils system, corruption, the failure
of democracy, and the “decay of a sense of responsibility
among the kind of people whom I knew. That was what im-
pressed me most: the kind of people I knew had neglected their
duties.” 2 As so often happens in the development of ideas and
public moods, the remarkable group of teachers and students
that gathered at Johns Hopkins in the late 1880’s and the 1890’s
was simply anticipating by a few years the civic consciousness
that soon swept over a vastly larger public. What Howe ob-
serves of the Johns Hopkins men of the nineties — “We felt that
the world had been wished onto our shoulders” 3 — became true
of a large part of the nation not long afterwards. After the turn
of the century the men who were in best rapport with public
sentiment were preaching to the whole nation the necessity of
taking up, personally and individually, those civic burdens
which the previous generation had forsaken. “No hard-and-fast
rule can be laid down,” said Theodore Roosevelt, “as to the way
in which such work [reform] must be done; but most certainly
every man, whatever his position, should strive to do it in some
way and to some degree.” 4

1 Howe : The Confessions of a Reformer, p. 17.

2 Ibid., p. 3.

8 Ibid., p. 8.

4 Theodore Roosevelt: “Reform through Social Work,” McClure’s , Vol.
XVI (March 1901), p. 454.

“. . . m the final analysis it was the voters who decided whether New
York should be 'open or ‘shut/ ” Josiah Flynt: “In the World of Graft,”
ibid (April 1901), p. 576.

“In short, if we want self-government ... we have got to work at it

206

THE AGE OF REFORM

One is impressed, in a review of the literature, with the
enormous amount of self-accusation among Progressives. Wil-
liam Allen White saw it when he attributed much of the move-
ment to the fact that "in the soul of the people there is a con-
viction of their past unrighteousness.” 5 The moral indignation
of the age was by no means directed entirely against others; it
was in a great and critical measure directed inward. Contem-
poraries who spoke of the movement as an affair of the con-
science were not mistaken. Lincoln Steffens had the key to this
sense of personal involvement when he entitled his famous
muckraking volume The Shame of the Cities.

Nothing, indeed, illustrates better than the Introduction to
Steffens’s volume the fashion in which the Yankee ethos of re-
sponsibility had become transmuted into a sense of guilt. Again
and again Steffens laid the responsibility for the ugly state of
affairs portrayed in his book at the doorsteps of his own readers.
"The misgovernment of the American people,” he declared, "is
misgovernment by the American people. . . . Are the people
honest? Are the people better than Tammany? . . . Isn’t our
corrupt government, after all, representative? . . . There is no
essential difference between the pull that gets your wife into
society or for your book a favorable review, and that which
gets a heeler into office, a thief out of jail, and a rich man’s son
on the board of directors of a corporation. . . . The boss is not
a political, he is an American institution, the product of a freed
people that have not the spirit to be free. . . . We are respon-

ourselves. President Roosevelt is right when he preaches broad morality;
the necessity of each man getting down and doing something himself.” Ray
Stannard Baker: "The Trust's New Tool— the Labor Boss/' ibid., Vol.
XXII (November 1903), p. 43 Cf the same author's conclusion that ev-
eiyone was guilty “who has not, himself obedient to the law, demanded
the election of men who will enforce the law.” “The Reign of Lawlessness,”
ibid, Vol. XXIII ( May 1904 ) , p. 56.

“They [the Christian citizens] could accomplish it by each individual
resolving to vote for God at the polls — that is to say, vote for the candidate
whom God would approve.” Anonymous: “Christian Citizenship/' ibid.,
Vol. XXVI (November 1905), p. 110.

6 William Allen White: The Old Order Changeth , p. 30.

207

Chapter v: The Progressive Impulse

sible, not our leaders, since we follow them. . . . The spirit of
graft and of lawlessness is the American spirit. . . . The peo-
ple are not innocent. That is the only ‘news’ in all the journalism
of these articles. . . . My purpose was ... to see if the shame-
ful facts, spread out in all their shame, would not burn through
our civic shamelessness and set fire to American pride.” Steffens
closed his introduction by dedicating his book “to the accused —
to all the citizens of all the cities in the United States.” 6

It may seem that there was remarkable boldness in this ac-
cusatory procedure, but such appearances are often deceptive.
Steffens had good reason to know that the substantial American
citizen accepted such accusation as valid. The people of Min-
neapolis and St. Louis had written not in resentment but m en-
couragement after his exposure of those cities had been published
in McClure's , and — still more significant — hundreds of invita-
tions poured in from citizens, as individuals or in organized
groups, of many other cities inviting exposure on their own
premises: “come and show us up; we’re worse than they are .” 7

Steffens’s argument that it was the people, and particularly
the “best” people, who were responsible for corruption cannot
be taken, however, as an ultimate comment on human nature
or the human condition. He was not preaching universal sin-
fulness as a token of the fact that most men would be damned,
but because he hoped and expected that all could be saved —
saved through this ardent appeal to their pride. This is the real
function of the pervasively ugly character of reality that the
Progressives so frequently harped on: pervasive as it was, it was
neither impenetrable nor irremovable: it was an instrument of
exhortation, not a clue to life but a fulcrum for reform. Steffens
hoped, at bottom, “that our shamelessness is superficial, that
beneath it lies a pride which, being real, may save us yet ” 8
For when the chips were down he could not but believe, as he

6 Lincoln Steffens: The Shame of the Cities (New York, 1904); the
quotations are drawn, passim , from the introduction, pp. L-26.

7 Ibid., p. 25.

208

THE AGE OF REFORM

said of the situation in St. Louis, that "the people are sound.” 9

Among some reformers this ethos of responsibility to which
Steffens appealed simply took the form of an effort to participate
in what the rhetoric of the time called “the race life” — which
meant, by and large, to get nearer to those who suffered in a
more profound and poignant way from the burdens of “reality.”
As early as 1892 Jane Addams had delivered a fine, penetrating
lecture on “The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements,” in
which she explained how the sheltered and well-brought-up
young Americans of her generation, reared on the ideal of social
justice and on Protestant moral imperatives, had grown un-
comfortable about their own sincerity, troubled about their
uselessness, and restless about being “shut off from the common
labor by which they live and which is a great source of moral
and physical health.” 1 Similarly a character in one of the social
novels of H. H. Boyesen, the son of a rich contractor, professed
“a sneaking sense of guilt when I am too comfortable,” and left
high society to plunge into what he called “the great discordant
tumultuous life, with its passions and cries of distress.” 2 Char-
acters with the same motivation were constantly to be found in
the pages of McClure’s — now, however, no longer only as the
protagonists of fiction, but as the authors of articles. 3 Where

9 Ibid , p. 140.

1 Jane Addams et al.: Philanthropy and Social Progress (New York,
1893), pp. 1-26.

2 H. H. Boyesen: Social Stragglers (New York, 1893), pp 78, 83-4,
273. The ethos of guilt and indignation, work and service, and the idea of
an implacable opposition between material gratification and spiritual devel-
opment are outstanding themes m the work of the most popular Progressive
novelist, Winston Churchill, who portrayed the whole movement as "the
springing of a generation of ideals from a generation of commerce.” See
Richard and Beatrice Hofstadter: "Winston Churchill: a Study in the
Popular Novel,” passim.

8 "Blair Carrhart goes as a laborer into the steel works, that he may
better know the men whom he wants to help. . . . With him we live a life
full of dangers and struggles and suffering. ’ A review of I. K. Friedman’s
By^Bread Alone , McClure's , Vol. XVII (September 1901), pp. 502—3.

"She was a woman of superior education and wide social experience,
and, like many other American women of similar qualifications, had that
tireless energy that could not be satisfied with remaimng a passive specta-

209

Chapter v: The Progressive Impulse

this impulse was translated into action it sent a host of earnest
reformers into the field to engage themselves in various useful
philanthropies. But on the purely verbal level, where of nec-
essity it had to remain for most people, it resulted on occasion
in a rather strenuous moral purgation, not unlike the pathetic
proletarianism that swept over many American intellectuals in
the 1930’s. One Florence Wilkinson contributed to McClure ? s
a poem entitled “The Tortured Millions”: 4

. . . They are dying that I may live, the tortured millions ,

By the Ohio River, the Euphrates, the Rhone.

They wring from the rocks my gold , the tortured millions ;

Sleepless all night they mix my daily bread;

With heavy feet they are trampling out my vintage ;

They go to a hungry grave that I may be fed. . . .

tor to the progressive life about her.” Lewis E MacBrayne: “The Promised
Land,” ibid, Vol XX (November 1902), p. 66.

“If we were not reading about matteis calculated to fill us with unutter-
able shame, we should be captivated by a style so frank, strong, and fer-
vent. Here is something better than entertainment.” Everybody s, review-
ing the work of Lincoln Steffens, as quoted in McClure's, Vol XXIII
(November 1904), p. 111. The significance of that last sentence should
not be passed over.

“We were as blind to real civil morals as the Spaniards of the Inquisi-
tion must have been to the morality of Christ.” William Allen White:
“Roosevelt, a Force for Righteousness,” ibid., Vol. XXVIII (January
1907), p 388. “. . . the whole infernal system of money-bought govern-
ment, money-bought churches and schools, was as surely made from the
commercial malice m our own hearts as the golden calf set up in the wil-
derness was the god of the Israelites.” Ibid., p. 394

See also the article by Rudolph Cronau: “A Continent Despoiled,” ibid.,
Vol. XXXII (April 1909), with its “incontrovertible and convicting evi-
dence of grave sms of which our nation has been guilty” (p. 639).

4 McClure's, Vol. XXIII (June 1904), pp. 167-8. The same author
published (December 1906) another expression of her feelmgs, “A Saluta-
tion to Russia,” written in a Whitmanesque manner and beginning. “You,
millions of muzhiks, huddled in the smoky doorways of your huts . .
This should be compared with her “Hands,” ibid. (June 1910), p. 229:

Oh, wonderful hands of toilers,

Graved with the signs of your crafts, . . .

I honor you, hands of toilers,
l kneel and kiss your hands.

210

THE AGE OF REFORM

I warm my hands at the fires of ruining houses ;

On a dying mothers breast I sink my head;

Last night my feet were faint from idleness,

I bathed my feet in blood her children shed .

O thou eternal Law , I wish this not to be.

Nay , raise them from the dust and punish me.

So the middle-class citizen received quite earnestly the ex-
hortations that charged him with personal responsibility for all
kinds of social ills. It was his business to do something about
them. Indeed, he must do something if he was ever to feel bet-
ter. But what should he do? He was too substantial a fellow to
want to make any basic changes in a society in which he was so
typically a prosperous and respectable figure. What he needed,
therefore, was a feeling that action was taking place, a sense
that the moral tone of things was being improved and that he
had a part in this improvement. Corruption thus became a par-
ticularly fine issue for the moral energies of the Progressive. He
was ready to be convinced that the country was thoroughly
wicked, and the muckrakers supplied him with a wealth of
plausible evidence.

In time the muckraking and reform writers seem to have be-
come half conscious of the important psychic function their
work was performing for themselves and their public, quite
apart from any legislative consequences or material gains. They
began to say, in effect, that even when they were unable to do
very much to change the exercise of political power, they liked
the sense of effort and the feeling that the moral tone of political
life had changed. “It is not the material aspect of this,” they
began to say, “but the moral aspect that interests us” William
Allen White dated the beginnings of this shift from “material-
ism” to “moral values” from the war with Spain when “the spirit
of sacrifice overcame the spirit of commercialism,” and the peo-
ple saw “that if we could learn to sacrifice our own interest for
those of a weaker people, we would learn the lesson needed to

211

Chapter v: The Progressive Impulse

solve the great problem of democracy — to check our national
greed and to make business honest.” 6 McClure himself gave
characteristic expression to this high valuation of the intangibles
when he praised Charles Evans Hughes’s exposure of the New
York life-insurance companies for the enormous “tonic effect of
the inquiry,” which, he felt, had very likely saved thousands of
young men from making compromises with honor. They saw
that 'public disgrace” awaited evildoers, and "there is no pun-
ishment so terrible as public disclosure of evil doing.” 6 Related
to this emphasis on moral as opposed to material values was a
fresh assertion of disdain for money and monetary success, very
reminiscent of the disdain of the Mugwump type for the ma-
terialists. 7 With this came a disparagement of material achieve-
ment. San Francisco, remarked George Kennan, was a success-
ful and prosperous city, but it had put stress 'upon material
achievement and business prosperity rather than upon civic
virtue and moral integrity. But what shall it profit a city if it
gain the whole world and lose its own soul?” 8 Probably no

5 The Old Order Changeth, p. 29.

6 McClures, Vol. XXVI (December 1905), p. 223. Cf. Burton J. Hen-
drick, who remarked concerning Hughes's governorship that it was too
early to judge the permanent effects of his changes but it was clear “that
he has permanently increased the influence of ms office, established new
ideals for his successors, impressed upon legislators new conceptions of
their responsibilities and greatly improved the tone and efficiency of public
life” “Governor Hughes,” ibid., Vol. XXX (April 1908), p. 681 (italics
added).

7 Cf. Miss Tarb ell's “John D. Rockefeller: a Character Study,” ibid.,
Vol. XXV (July-August 1905).

8 George Kennan: “Criminal Government and the Private Citizen,”
ibid., Vol. XXX (November 1907), p. 71. (This George Kennan, 1845-
1924, the explorer and journalist, should not be confused with George F.
Kennan the diplomat, who is his nephew. ) Cf . the opmion of Judge Ben B.
Lmdsey that the most appalling price of lawlessness and corruption was not
the material but the moral cost. ^The bottom of the whole trouble is a land
of selfishness that m this country is exalting money above manhood, and
no business is ever going to be permanently successful so long as it is based
upon an iniquitous doctrine like that” Ibid. (January 1908), p. 386. Com-
pare with this the extraordinary idealization of both business and the gro-
fessions expressed m Brandeis's famous essay “Business — a Profession, ' in
which it is argued that “success m business must mean something very
different from mere money-making” and that the joys of business must not

212

THE AGE OF REFORM

statesman o£ the time had a better intuitive understanding of
the interest of the reform mind in moral intangibles than Theo-
dore Roosevelt, whose preachments exploited it to the full. And
no observer had a better insight into T. R.’s relation to his time
than the Sage of Emporia, who declared quite properly that
“Roosevelt’s power in this land is a spiritual power. His is not a
kingdom of this earth. ... It is immaterial whether or not the
Supreme Court sustains him in his position on the rate bill, the
income tax, the license for corporations, or the inheritance tax;
not for the establishment of a system of statutes was he born
into this world; but rather like all great teachers, that by his life
and his works he should bear witness unto the truth.” 9 This was
a penetrating comment upon the meaning of the reform litera-
ture as a kind of symbolic action. For, besides such material ac-
complishment as they had to show for themselves, the Progres-
sive writers could claim that they had provided a large part of
the American people with a necessary and (as they would have
said) wholesome catharsis.

be “the mere vulgar satisfaction which is experienced in the acquisition of
money, in the exercise of power or in the frivolous pleasure of mere win-
ning” Business — a Profession (Boston, 1944), pp. 3, 5; this essay wa# orig-
inally written m 1912.

9 William Allen White: “Roosevelt, a Force for Righteousness,” ibid.,
Vol. XXVIH (January 1907), p. 393.

((( 213 )))

CHAPTER VI

THE STRUGGLE OVER ORGANIZATION

i. Organization and the Individual

P

iL ROGRESsrvisM, at its heart, was an effort to realize familiar and
traditional ideals under novel circumstances. As I have empha-
sized, the ordinary American’s ideas of what political and eco-
nomic life ought to be like had long since taken form under the
conditions of a preponderantly rural society with a broad diffu-
sion of property and power. In that society large aggregates had
played a minor role. Corporate businesses were then just
emerging, and they had not yet achieved the enormous size and
national scope which they acquired during the closing decades
of the nineteenth century, when the Progressive generation was
still growing up. Political machines, though an important feature
of American life since the days of Aaron Burr, had not played
the massive managerial role that they now assumed in American
cities and states, and in any case had appeared less formidable
threats to civic virtue and democratic politics than they now
seemed to be in the corrupting presence of the great corpora-
tions. The American tradition had been one of unusually wide-
spread participation of the citizen in the management of affairs,
both political and economic . 1 Now the growth of the large cor-
poration, the labor union, and the big impenetrable political
machine was clotting society into large aggregates and present-
ing to the unorganized citizen the prospect that all these ag-

1 On the histone roots of this participation, see the illuminating essay by
Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitnck: "A Meamng for Turner’s Frontier,
Part I: Democracy in the Old Northwest,” Political Science Quarterly , Vol.
LXIX ( September 1954), pp. 321-53.

214

THE AGE OF REFORM

gregates and interests would be able to act in concert and shut
out those men for whom organization was difficult or impossible.
As early as 1894 William Dean Howells, who had grown up in
a small Midwestern community, remarked that the character of
American life had undergone a drastic change. “The struggle
for life,” he said, “has changed from a free fight to an encounter
of disciplined forces, and the free fighters that are left get
ground to pieces between organized labor and organized capi-
tal.” 2 Ray Stannard Baker, writing in McClures almost a decade
later, pointed out that a number of well-knit local combinations
of capital and labor had recently been organized, and gave
voice to the fears of the potential victims: “The unorganized
public, where will it come in? The professional man, the lec-
turer, the writer, the artist, the farmer, the salaried government
employee, and all the host of men who are not engaged in the
actual production or delivery of necessary material things, how
will they fare? ... Is there any doubt that the income of or-
ganized labor and the profits of organized capital have gone up
enormously, while the man-on-a-salary and most of the great
middle class, paying much more for the necessaries of life, have
had no adequate increase in earnings?” 3 The central theme in
Progressivism was this revolt against the industrial discipline:
the Progressive movement was the complaint of the unorganized
against the consequences of organization.

Of course there was a problem underlying this effort that did
not escape the most astute contemporaries, including many who
sympathized deeply with the Progressives. The processes of
modern technology and machine industry — not to speak o£ the
complex tasks of civic life — make organization, specialism, hier-
archy, and discipline utterly necessary. The Progressives, object
though they might to the many sacrifices of traditional values

2 Howells: A Traveler from Altruria (Edinburgh, 1894), p. 164.

3 Ray Stannard Baker: “Capital and Labor Hunt Together,” McClure’s,
Vol. XXI (September 1903), p 463; cf. the remarks of Mr. Dooley [Fin-
ley Peter Dunne]: Dissertations by Mr. Dooley (New York, 1906), p. 64.

215

Chapter vx: The Struggle over Organization

that the new society demanded, did not seriously propose to
dismantle this society, forsake its material advantages, and re-
turn to a more primitive technology. Nor did they always make
the mistake of thinking that the revolt against organization
could go on without itself developing new forms of organization.
They were trying, in short, to keep the benefits of the emerging
organization of life and yet to retain the scheme of individual-
istic values that this organization was destroying. In order to
understand them sympathetically, then, it is important to think
of them not as stupid or incapable men who fumbled a simple
task, but as men of reasonable and often indeed of penetrating
intelligence whose fate it was to attempt, with great zeal and re-
sourcefulness, a task of immense complexity and almost hopeless
difficulties.

Long before the Progressives arose some Americans had seen
that organization had its disadvantages and dangers, but it was
in the Progressive era that the social types expropriated and
alienated by the new organization reached a new peak in num-
bers and a pitch of restiveness such as they have not shown
since. Many historians have pointed out that Progressivism ap-
pealed powerfully to small businessmen who were being over-
whelmed or outdistanced by great competitors. It also appealed
— as all the rhetoric about the trusts and the consumer made
evident — to the new middle class of technicians and salaried
professionals, clerical workers, salespeople, and public-service
personnel that multiplied along with the great corporations and
the specialized skills of corporate society. This was by far the
most rapidly growing stratum in the population. From 1870 to
1910, when the whole population of the United States increased
two and one-third times, the old middle class — business entre-
preneurs and independent professional men — grew somewhat
more than two times; the working class, including farm labor,
grew a little more than three times; the number of farmers and
farm tenants doubled. But the new middle class grew almost
eight times, rising from 756,000 to 5,609,000 people. When we

216

THE AGE OF REFORM

compare the latter figure with the 3,261,000 independent enter-
prisers and self-employed professionals, we have some notion of
the relative strength of these two strata of the population from
which Progressivism drew so much of its urban following. 4

A large and significant political public had emerged that was
for the most part fairly well educated, genteel in its outlook, full
of aspiration, and almost completely devoid of economic organi-
zation. It had no labor unions, no trade associations; its profes-
sional societies were without bargaining power. It had only
political means through which to express its discontents. While
it could not strike or fix prices or support expensive lobbies, it
could read the muckraking magazines, listen to the Progressive
orators, and vote. I suspect that this class was recruited in very
large measure from people who had either risen upwards or
moved sideways in the social scale — of Yankee farmers’ sons
who had come to the city, of native workmen’s children aspiring
to white-collar respectability — of people, in short, who had been
bred upon the Horatio Alger legend and the American dream of
success and who had not given up hope of realizing it. Today
the white-collar class is more apathetic and more self-indulgent;
it hopes chiefly for security, leisure, and comfort and for the
enjoyment of the pleasures of mass entertainment. But in the
Progressive era this class still lived within the framework of
the old ambitions. 5 While it resented the swollen wealth of the
tycoons and the crass impersonal conditions of economic life
under the corporate economy, it none the less maintained a half-

4 The new middle class had risen from 33 per cent of the entire middle
class m 1870 to 63 per cent m 1910. I have followed the computations of
Lewis Corey. “The Middle Class,” Antioch Review (Spring 1945), based
upon Population. Comparative Occupational Statistics for the United
States , 1870 to 1940 , published by the Umted States Bureau of the Census.
For a critical view of the new middle class today, see C. Wnght Mills:
White Collar (New York, 1951).

5 The decline of career aspiration and the growing tendency to seek
comfort and interpret life from the standpoint of the consumer is the theme
of Leo Lowenthars suggestive study: “Biographies in Popular Magazines,”
in Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Frank Stanton, eds.: Radio Research 1942-1943
(New York, 1944), pp. 507-48

217

Chapter vi: The Struggle over Organization

suppressed feeling of admiration and envy for the captains of
industry who had after all done no more than fulfill the old
dream of heroic personal ascendancy. This may explain why the
very journals that ran the devastating muckrakers’ exposures of
the predations and excesses of the corporations also published
hero tales about the outstanding figures of American industry.
It may also explain why the same Progressive periodicals, and
even the Socialist periodicals , 6 that pilloried the evils of Ameri-
can society, tore into its established ideas, and offered blueprints
for progress and reform were full of little individualistic adver-
tisements intended to tell clerks how they could improve them-
selves and "get ahead* — so that simply by moving one’s eye
from left to right, from one column to the next, one could pass
from the world in which the Beef Trust or Standard Oil was
being exposed and denounced, to the world in which "You Too
Can Be a Certified Public Accountant.”

The discontent over the trusts expressed familiar ideals of
entrepreneurship and opportunity which great numbers of
Americans were quite unwilling to abandon. In the old society
upon which American ideas of the right and the good had been
founded, the fluid capital of the middle classes had commonly
found an outlet in investments over which the investors exer-
cised a large measure of control. The typical business unit of
the early and middle nineteenth century was owned by an indi-
vidual or a small group, was limited in size by the personal
wealth of the individuals who controlled it, and was managed
either directly by them or by their agents. As the corporate

6 Daniel Bell points out how common in the columns of the Interna-
tional Socialist Review , the chief magazine of American Sociahsm, were the
advertisements instructing readers m the art of “doubling or tripling
YOUR MONEY THROUGH CLEAN HONEST INVESTMENT,” Or earning $300 SL
month selling cream separators Socialists seem to have been very fond of
real-estate promotions and gold-mine stocks Daniel Bell. “Marxian Social-
ism in the United States,” m Donald Drew Egbert and Stow Persons, eds.:
Socialism and American Life (Princeton, 1952), Vol. I, pp 298-9. On the
middle-class character of American Socialism, see David A Shannon: “The
Sociahst Party before the First World War,” Mississippi Valley Historical
Review , Vol. XXXVIII (September 1951), pp. 279-88.

218

THE AGE OF REFORM

form of organization grew and a large market in corporate
securities was developed, the savings and investments and in-
surance of the substantial middle class, and with these more
and more of the power to make the vital economic decisions of
society, passed into the hands of the masters of corporations and
the investment bankers. The restlessness of the Progressive era
owed much of its force to a class of substantial property-owning
citizens whose powers of economic decision had been expropri-
ated by the system of corporate organization.

It would be misleading to imply that the development of the
corporation eliminated profitable direct small-scale investments.
Quite the contrary, for the urbanization of the country brought
a growing need for the work of service industries that are usu-
ally organized in small units, and such lines of enterprise con-
tinued to offer much opportunity for small investors who were
satisfied to operate profitably on a small scale in marginal lines
of business. But such enterprises could not absorb more than a
part of middle-class savings; and after 1870 the decisive and
strategic lines of enterprise that called the tune for the economy
as a whole, that afforded the richest profits and aroused the
highest excitement in the entrepreneurial imagination, passed
increasingly under the corporate form of organization. Confined
in the pre-Civil War period to a few types of industries, the busi-
ness corporation had taken a new lease on life as a consequence
of the Civil War. The necessities of war finance and the success
of Jay Cooke in reaching the domestic investor with government
securities had awakened men to the possibilities of a domestic
investment market. In the period after the war this market had
grown swiftly, spreading from the railroad and banking fields
into public utilities, mining and quarrying, manufacturing, and
eventually merchandising. By 1900 there were estimated to
be 4,400,000 stockholders in American corporations; by 1917,
8,600,000. 7

7 A. A. Berle and G. Means: The Modem Corporation and Private
Property (ed. New York, 1947), p. 56.

219

Chapter vi: The Struggle over Organization

One area in which middle-class savings became a focus of
poignant conflict was that of life insurance. As a major pivot of
finance, life insurance was a product of the post-Civil War era.
Life-insurance protection in the United States, which amounted
to $5.47 per capita in 1860, rose to $40.69 in 1885, and to $179.14
in 1910. 8 The aggregate of insurance in force rose by 577 per
cent between 1870 and 1896, while the total admitted assets of
the insurance companies rose by 958 per cent. 9 With these
changes in the size of the business came internal changes in
company policy. The adoption of the so-called deferred-
dividend contract made available to the insurance managers
large undistributed surpluses that did not have the legal status
of liabilities in the companies’ accounts. These surpluses, sup-
posedly to be distributed at the end of stated periods to policy-
holders, were drawn upon by the managers of some of the large
companies and used for speculative purposes through subsidiary
companies. The exposure of these life-insurance practices in the
work of the New York State legislature’s Armstrong Committee
and in such books as Burton J. Hendricks’s The Story of Life
Insurance made it painfully clear to the policy-holding public
that even in the citadels of security they were being shamelessly
and ruthlessly gulled. 1

A thought most galling to middle-class investors was that the
shrinkage in their own power and the growth in the power of
the "plutocracy” were based upon their own savings — that, as
Louis D. Brandeis put it, "the fetters which bind the people are
forged from the people’s own gold.” 2 The American had been

8 Shepard B. Clough: A Century of Life Insurance (New York, 1946),
pp. 3, 6.

9 Ibid., pp. 128-30.

1 Ibid., chapter xn, Marquis James: The Metropolitan Life (New York,
1947), chapters vm and ix; Merlo J. Pusey: Charles Evans Hughes (New
York, 1951), Vol. I, chapter xv; and Douglass North: ‘‘Capital Accumula-
tion m Life Insurance between the Civd War and the Investigation of
1905,” in William Miller, ed.: Men in Business (Cambridge, 1952), pp.
238-53.

2 Louis D. Brandeis: Other People’s Money (1914; ed.. National Home
Library Foundation, 1932), pp. 12-13.

220

THE AGE OF REFORM

brought up to accept as "natural” a type of economy in which
enterprise was diffused among a multitude of firms and in which
the process of economic decision, being located everywhere,
could not be located anywhere in particular. Now it was shock-
ing to learn that this economy had been self-destructive, that it
was giving way to small bodies of men directing great corpo-
rations whose decisions, as Woodrow Wilson protested, were
"autocratic,” who could concentrate in themselves "the resources,
the choices, the opportunities, in brief, the power of thousands.”
The poor stockholder, Wilson continued, "does not seem to
enjoy any of the substantial rights of property in connection with
[corporate stocks]. He is merely contributing money for the
conduct of a business which other men run as they please. If
he does not approve of what they do, there seems nothing for
it but to sell the stock ( though their acts may have depreciated
its value immensely). He cannot even inquire or protest without
being told to mind his own business — the very thing he was
innocently trying to do !” 3 The Pujo Committee investigators
underlined this argument when they revealed that none of the
witnesses that appeared before them was able to mention a
single instance in the country's history in which stockholders
had either successfully overthrown the management of any
large corporation or secured an investigation of its conduct . 4

People readily acknowledged that in spite of all this they were
prosperous. But many of them could not help feeling that this
prosperity was being obtained on false pretenses, that it was
theirs in disregard of sound and ancient principles, and that for
this disregard they would in good time come to grief. It had
been their tradition to believe that prosperity and economic
progress came not through big or monopolistic businesses — that
is, through the gains and economies of organization — but rather
through competition and hard work and individual enterprise

3 Woodrow Wilson: “The Lawyer and the Community,” North Ameri-
can Review, Vol. CXCH (November 1910), pp. 612, 617-18.

4 Brandeis, op cit., p. 41.

221

Chapter vi: The Struggle aver Organization

and initiative. They had been brought up to think of the well-
being of society not merely in structural terms — not as some-
thing resting upon the sum of its technique and efficiency — but
in moral terms, as a reward for the sum total of individual quali-
ties and personal merits. This tradition, rooted in the Protestant
ethic itself, was being wantonly defied by the system of corpo-
rate organization.

In 1905 Judge Peter S. Grosscup of the United States Circuit
Court of Appeals published in McClures an article that reveals,
coming as it did from a man of impeccable conservatism, 5 how
widespread this concern was. Although Grosscup acknowledged
that the nation was enjoying a prosperity and power such as it
had never seen before, he expressed his fear that it was losing its
soul. It was the intangibles that worried him. Neither the pros-
perity nor the power was in danger, but "the soul of republican
America ... is individual opportunity. . . . The loss that re-
publican America now confronts is the loss of individual hope
and prospect — the suppression of the instinct that . . . has
made us a nation of individually independent and prosperous
people. 3 * The country was in the midst of a trend that, if not
deflected, would eventually reach a point at which "the acquisi-
tion of property, by the individuals who constitute the bulk of
the people, will cease to be one of the opening and controlling
purposes of their lives. This means that, as a republican political
institution, America will have lost the spirit which alone prom-
ises it life. It means social and, eventually, political revolution/*
The widespread apprehension about corporations was not
merely a consequence of anxiety over high prices. It was rather
the result of an "intuitive perception that, somewhere, some-
thing is wrong — that in the face of the future there is a disturb-

5 A McKinley Republican and a distinguished jurist, Grosscup had been
one of two judges issuing the injunction against Debs and other American
Railway Umon officials in 1894, and he had been among those calling on
President Cleveland to use troops m the Pullman strike. He also was pre-
siding judge of the Circuit Court of Appeals that reversed District Judge
Kenesaw Mountain Landis's imposition of a $29,240,000 fine on Standard
Oil for accepting rebates.

222

THE AGE OF REFORM

ing, even sinister look ” What was wrong was that the corpo-
ration was putting an unbearable strain on the institution of
private property, upon which the civilization of the world
rested; for it was the desire and the hope of acquiring private
property upon which the entire moral discipline of an indi-
vidualist society must rely. The nation was at a crossroad lead-
ing on one side to corporate paternalism and on the other to
state socialism — both fatal to individual liberties. Fortunately
there was another path that could still be taken: "Individual
Opportunity — the opportunity, actual as well as in theory, to
each individual to participate in the proprietorship of the coun-
try”

Grosscup proposed, in short, to reverse the entire process by
which the individual had been expropriated. This he thought
could be done if the matter was taken out of the hands of the
states and vested in the federal government, if "stock-jobbing”
and stock-watering were prevented (that is, if the corporation
was "regenerated”), and if the "road to proprietorship” was
opened to the wage-earners of the country. 6 How such proprie-
torship could be made possible he did not say.

Grosscup was expressing an attitude toward economic life
that was to appear with increasing frequency down to the end
of the Progressive era. While the great theoretician and tech-
nician of this protest was Louis D. Brandeis, its master spokes-
man in politics was Woodrow Wilson, whose campaign speeches
in 1912 provide us with a magnificently articulate expression of
the whole impulse. Like Gross cup’s article, Wilson s evocative
speeches express the tendency of the middle-class public to
think of the economic order not quite so much as a system or-
ganized for the production and distribution of goods as a system
intended to stimulate and reward certain traits of personal char-
acter. The public to which Wilson appealed had been brought
up on the nineteenth-century ideal of opportunity and the notion

6 Peter S. Grosscup: “How to Save the Corporation,” McClure’s, Vol.
XXIV (February 1905), pp. 443-8.

223

Chapter vi: The Struggle over Organization

that success was a reward for energy, efficiency, frugality, per-
severance, ambition, and insight. In their thinking, people com-
peted — or ought to compete — in the exercise of these qualities,
and success ought properly to go to those who had the most of
them. The metaphor they most often and most significantly used
in describing their economic ideal was that of a race — “the race
of life,” as it was commonly called. What Wilson was pointing
to — and what he refused to accept as a governing principle for
American industry — was the fact that this race was no longer
being run. It had once been true that a man could “choose his
own calling and pursue it just as far as his abilities enable him
to pursue it.” America had been committed to “ideals of abso-
lutely free opportunity, where no man is supposed to be under
any limitations except the limitations of his character and of his
mind . . . where men win or lose on their merits.” By various
means the new system of organization had destroyed this body
of ideals. But: “America will insist upon recovering in practice
those ideals which she has always professed ” 7
Wilson saw that Americans were living under “a new organi-
zation of society,” in which the individual had been “sub-
merged” and human relations were pervasively impersonal.
Wilson s hero, the rising individual entrepreneur of classical
economics and of earlier days of diffused property management,
had been done in by just such impersonal organization. This
entrepreneurial hero — referred to by Wilson as the “beginner,”
the “man with only a little capital,” the “new entry” in the race,
“the man on the make”— was the figure for whom he was par-
ticularly solicitous. For Wilson was profoundly interested, he
said, in “the constant renewal of society from the bottom,” upon
which the genius and enterprise of America had always de-
pended. And while it was true that the country was still pros-
perous, the “middle class is being more and more squeezed out
by the processes which we have been taught to call processes of
prosperity. Its members are sharing prosperity, no doubt; but
7 Wilson: The New Freedom (New York, 1913), pp. 14-15, 30.

224

THE AGE OF REFORM

what alarms me is that they are not originating prosperity" The
real treasury of America lay in the ambitions and energies that
were not restricted to a special favored class but depended upon
the inventions and originations of ‘unknown men.” “Anything
that depresses, anything that makes the organization greater
than the man, anything that blocks, discourages, dismays the
humble man, is against all the principles of progress.” 8 Accord-
ing to the ideals of individualism, then, the acknowledged power
and prosperity of the country had been achieved by means that
must in the long run be considered retrogressive. For was it not
true that the big fellows had narrowed and stiffened the lines
of endeavor, cut the little man off from credit, and shut the
markets against him? 9 This process had gone so far that men
were about to forget “the ancient time when America lay in
every hamlet, when America was to be seen in every fair valley,
when America displayed her great forces on the broad prairies,
ran her fine fires of enterprise up over the mountainsides and
down into the bowels of the earth, and eager men were every-
where captains of industry, not employees; not looking to a
distant city to find out what they might do, but looking about
among their neighbors, finding credit according to their charac-
ter, not according to their connections, finding credit in propor-
tion to what was known to be in them and behind them, not in
proportion to the securities they held that were approved where
they were not known.” 1

While the worst forebodings of the Progressives were not to
be realized, one must see with sympathy the view of affairs
taken by the men of their generation whose historical conscious-
ness had been formed on the American experience with individ-
ual enterprise. The drama of American history had been played
out on a continent three thousand miles wide and almost half
as long. Great political issues had been fought out over this

8 Ibid., pp. 3, 5, 6, 15-18, 82, 85, 86-7.

9 Ibid., pp. 14-19.

1 Ibid., pp. 18-19.

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Chapter vt: The Struggle over Organization

terrain, great economic risks taken on it, fantastic profits exacted
from it. The generation that had not yet passed from the scene
had produced and admired, even as it resented and feared, a
Carnegie, a Rockefeller, a Hill, a Harriman, a Morgan. America
had engendered a national imagination keyed to epic dimen-
sions, a soul unhappy without novelty and daring, raised on the
conquest of a continent, the settlement of an immense domain,
the creation within the life span of one man of a gigantic system
of industry and transportation. Its people had pioneered, impro-
vised, and gambled their way across the continent. And now
were its young men to become a nation of employees, at best of
administrators, were they to accept a dispensation under which
there was nothing but safe investment, to adapt themselves
passively to a life without personal enterprise even on a moder-
ate scale? How, then, was the precious spiritual bravura of the
whole American enterprise to be sustained? And if it could not
be sustained, what would become of America? The Progressives
were not fatalists; they did not intend quietly to resign them-
selves to the decline of this great tradition without at least one
brave attempt to recapture that bright past in which there had
been a future.

n. The State and the Trusts

The Progressive case against business organization was not con-
fined to economic considerations, nor even to the more intangi-
ble sphere of economic morals. Still more widely felt was a fear
founded in political realities — the fear that the great business
combinations, being the only centers of wealth and power,
would be able to lord it over all other interests and thus to put
an end to traditional American democracy. Here Wilson elo-
quently expressed a fear that troubled a great many men who
did not fully share his burning interest in creating economic
opportunities for small entrepreneurs and for men out of un-

226

THE AGE OF REFORM

known homes. While the entrepreneurial resentment of the
trusts had its greatest meaning for small businessmen, the lower
middle class, and those who had inherited Populistic traditions,
the fear of the trusts as a threat to democratic government,
which of course disturbed the same groups, also affected other
types — urban lawyers, professionals and intellectuals, practical
politicians recruited from the old elites, who often looked with
disdain upon the purely economic jealousies of would-be com-
petitors of big business. Only in limited numbers did men aspire
to go into business, but men in any segment of society might
become concerned as to whether the enormous combinations
of capital were at all compatible with a free society.

By the close of his 1912 campaign there was no doubt left in
Wilson s mind that a great part of the public considered an
attack on business monopoly necessary to political freedom, for
he had seen campaign crowds respond with marked enthusiasm
to his denunciation of restraints and his effort to link political
and economic liberties. He was engaged, he said, in "a crusade
against powers that have governed us — that have limited our
development — that have determined our lives — that have set us
in a straitjacket to do as they please/' Drawing himself up to
assert the full import of his own ideas, he continued: "This is a
second struggle for emancipation. . . . If America is not to have
free enterprise, then she can have freedom of no sort whatever.” 2

The fear that Americans might be completely divested of con-
trol over their own affairs confirmed a well-established trait in
the national character: the distrust of authority. While it has

2 Arthur S. Link: Wilson: the Road to the White House (Princeton,
1947), p. 514. When one reflects that this idea, that “free enterprise” is
the cornerstone upon which all other freedoms rest, has become the rally-
ing cry of the conservatives in America and the supreme shibboleth of the
National Association of Manufacturers, one realizes why so many men who
were ardent Progressives before the first World War could have become
equally ardent conservatives during the past twenty years without any
sense that they were being inconsistent. Indeed, they had held to the same
ideas with great constancy; it was history itself that was inconsistent, and
the world at large that had changed.

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Chapter vx: The Struggle over Organization

been a familiar observatioi^ at least since the time of Tocqueville
that the American yields all too readily to the tyranny of public
opinion, it is important to understand that in this context public
opinion is hard to locate rigorously: it is diffuse and decentral-
ized, and it belongs, after all, to the people themselves — or so
it seems. But authority that can be clearly located in persons,
or in small bodies of persons, is characteristically suspect in
America. Historically, individual enterprise has been at a pre-
mium. For the many tasks that cannot be handled by individu-
als Americans have preferred to found voluntary group asso-
ciations. For the remaining tasks that cannot be handled without
the sanction of government and law they have preferred where
possible to act through local government, which seems close to
them, and then through state government; and only when these
resources have failed have they called upon the federal govern-
ment for action. This distrust of authority has often been turned
against government, particularly when government was felt to
be strong or growing in strength. It was called upon during the
agitations that led to the American Revolution, and it gave te-
nacity to the most ardent supporters of the Revolutionary War.
It helped impede the adoption of the Federal Constitution, it
was invoked to justify secession, it caused Americans to post-
pone into the twentieth century governmental responsibilities
that were assumed decades earlier among other Western socie-
ties, and in recent years it has sustained a large part of the
population in its resistance to the innovations of the New Deal.

But this distrust of authority has on other occasions been
turned primarily against business, or at least against some por-
tions of the business community. In the Jackson era the United
States Bank paid dearly for its growing power over the country’s
credit. In the Progressive era the entire structure of business
similarly became the object of a widespread hostility which
stemmed from the feeling that business was becoming a closed
system of authoritative action. Suppose, it was argued, that the
process of business combination goes on in the future as it has

228

THE AGE OF REFORM

in the past, with ever larger combinations emerging. Then sup-
pose that, perhaps under the auspices of the investment bankers,
there should covertly come to be a “combination of the combi-
nations . . . ‘a community of interest 5 more formidable than
any conceivable single combination that dare appear in the
open . 55 3 What then would be the situation of American democ-
racy? Already the power of economic decision had been ex-
propriated from the owners of property in the great lines of
corporate enterprise. The next step would be the expropriation
of political decision, for it would not be too difficult for such a
great combination to buy up the political process, as it were, to
bend the corrupt political machines and the venal politicians
to its purposes — as, indeed, on a local and limited scale some
of the existing combinations had already done. Then the voice
of the ordinary voter would be as effectually eliminated from
political influence as the voice of the ordinary stockholder had
been from the conduct of the giant corporation. Even if the in-
tentions of the masters of industry should prove benevolent, it
would not suit a free people to submit to paternalism, to guardi-
anship, to restraints imposed from without. In a more moderate
and more justified form Progressive thinking thus displays some
of that same fear of a secret conspiratorial plutocracy which had
had such a melodramatic formulation among the Populists. It
was less common among the Progressives to impute sinister in-
tent or all-embracing design to the plutocrats, but they were
still restive under the awareness that vital decisions were being
made with which they had nothing to do. “Somewhere, by
somebody,” said Wilson, “the development of industry is being
controlled.” It was imperative for “the law to step in” and
create new and more tolerable conditions of life under which
there would be no more secrecy of decision. “There ought to
be no place where anything can be done that everybody does
not know about.” All legislation, all economic operations, should
take place in the open. If the people knew what decisions were
s The phrase is Wilson’s: The New Freedom , p. 187.

229

Chapter vi: The Struggle over Organization

being made, knew how they were being governed, and had in
their hands the instruments of action, they would have a fair
opportunity to elect men who would devise the necessary reme-
dies. 4 (Here, as in so many instances, one can see the domestic
analogue of Wilson’s foreign policy: in business, as in world
affairs, there was to be no more secret diplomacy, nothing but
open covenants of business, openly arrived at. )

In the past the state and federal governments had been limited
in their functions, in the size of their operations, in their power
to regulate. In the earlier nineteenth century these governments,
considered as units of organization, had been small entities in a
world of small entities. Into the midst of this system of diffused
power and unorganized strength the great corporations and in-
vestment houses had now thrust themselves, gigantic units com-
manding vast resources and quite capable of buying up political
support on a wholesale basis, just as they bought their other
supplies. The Progressives were thus haunted by the specter of
a private power far greater than the public power of the state.
As early as 1888 Charles William Eliot, in a well-known essay
on “The Working of the American Democracy,” had pointed out
that the great corporations, as units of organization, had far
outstripped the governments of the states. He remarked that a
certain railroad with offices in Boston employed 18,000 persons,
had gross receipts of about $40,000,000 a year, and paid its
highest-salaried officer $35,000. At the same time the Common-
wealth of Massachusetts employed only 6,000 persons, had gross
receipts of about $7,000,000 and paid no salary higher than
$6,500. And a really great railroad like the Pennsylvania would
overshadow the Commonwealth far more imposingly than the
Boston organization. 5 As units of organization the state govem-

4 Ibid., pp 20, 22, 62, 114, 125-6, and chapter vi passim.

5 Charles William Eliot. American Contributions to Civilization (New
York, 1907), pp. 85-6. Eliot was not so much m fear of corporate power as
some of the Progressives came to be, but he was concerned to make the
observation that “the activity of corporations, great and small, penetrates
every part of the industrial and social body, and their daily maintenance

£30 THE AGE OF REFORM

ments were now relatively small enough to become the fiefs of
the corporations.

Eliot wrote at a time when the movement toward combination
was still far from its peak. The organization of the giant corpo-
rations after 1898 and the system of interlocking directorates
revealed during the Progressive era suggested that all govern-
ment, federal as well as state, was overshadowed. The capital,
for instance, raised to organize the billion-dollar steel trust in
1901 was enough to pay the costs of all functions of the federal
government for almost two years. In March 1908 Senator La Fol-
lette made a memorable speech in the Senate on the control of
American industry, transportation, and finance, in which he
attempted to prove with careful documentation from the inter-
locking directorates of American corporations that fewer than
one hundred men, acting in concert, controlled the great busi-
ness interests of the country. “Does anyone doubt,” he asked,
“the community of interest that binds these men together?” 6

Four years later the investigations of the Pujo Committee
spelled out in alarming detail what La Follette had pointed to:
the Morgan interests at the peak of the financial system held 341
directorships in 112 corporations (insurance companies, trans-
portation systems, manufacturing and trading corporations, and
public utilities) with aggregate resources or capitalization
of $22,245,000,000. This inventory — an incomplete one — thus
showed a single network of interests commanding more than
three times the assessed value of all the real and personal prop-
erty in New England; or more than twice the assessed value of
all the property in the thirteen Southern states; or more than all
the property in the twenty-two states west of the Mississippi. 7
The mind reeled in horror at the thought of such a vast power,
unchecked by any comparable or equal power responsible to

brings into play more mental and moral force than the maintenance of all
the governments on the [American] Continent combined.” Cf. the remarks
of Wilson: The New Freedom , pp. 187-8.

6 Congressional Record , 60th Cong , 1st Sess., March 17, 1908, p. 3450.

7 Brandeis. Other People's Money ; pp. 22-3.

231

Chapter vi: The Struggle over Organization

the public, moving quietly and relentlessly toward the achieve-
ment of its political goals. Ignatius Donnelly’s nightmare about
a society ruled by an inner council of plutocrats now seemed,
even to much soberer minds than his, not altogether fantastic.
“If monopoly persists” declared Wilson, “monopoly will always
sit at the helm of the government. I do not expect to see mo-
nopoly restrain itself. If there are men in this country big enough
to own the government of the United States, they are going to
own it.” 8

Now, reluctantly rather than enthusiastically, the average
American tended more and more to rely on government regu-
lation, to seek in governmental action a counterpoise to the
power of private business. In his resentment against the incur-
sions of business organization upon his moral sensibilities and
his individualistic values, he began to support governmental
organization and to accept more readily than he had been will-
ing to do before the idea that the reach of government must be
extended. Since the state governments, so long the central agen-
cies of political action, had been clearly outdistanced by busi-
ness interests (which were in any case constitutionally beyond
the reach of state control), he looked to the federal government
as his last resource for the control of business, thus ironically
lending support to another step in the destruction of that system
of local and decentralized values in which he also believed. The
long-range trend toward federal regulation, which found its be-
ginnings in the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 and the Sher-
man Act of 1890, which was quickened by a large number of
measures in the Progressive era, and which has found its con-
summation in our time, was thus at first the response of a pre-
dominantly individualistic public to the uncontrolled and starkly
original collectivism of big business. In America the growth of
the national state and its regulative power has never been ac-
cepted with complacency by any large part of the middle-class
public, which has not relaxed its suspicion of authority, and

8 Wilson: The New Freedom , p. 286.

232

THE AGE OF REFORM

which even now gives repeated evidence o£ its intense dislike of
statism. In our time this growth has been possible only under the
stress of great national emergencies, domestic or military, and
even then only in the face of continuous resistance from a sub-
stantial part of the public. In the Progressive era it was possible
only because of a widespread and urgent fear — fear of business
consolidation and private business authority. Since it has be-
come common in recent years for ideologists of the extreme right
to portray the growth of statism as the result of a sinister con-
spiracy of collectivists inspired by foreign ideologies, it is per-
haps worth emphasizing that the first important steps toward
the modem organization of society were taken by arch-indi-
vidualists — the tycoons of the Gilded Age — and that the primi-
tive beginning of modem statism was largely the work of men
who were trying to save what they could of the eminently native
Yankee values of individualism and enterprise.

But if the power of the state had to be built up, it would be
more important than it had ever been that the state be a neutral
state which would realize as fully as possible the preference of
the middle-class public for moderation, impartiality, and "law.”
If big business sought favoritism and privilege, then the state
must be powerful enough to be more than a match for business.
But the state must not be anti-business, nor even anti-big-
business: it must be severely neutral among all the special inter-
ests in society, subordinating each to the common interest and
dealing out even-handed justice to all. It would be for neither
the rich man nor the poor man, for labor nor capital, but for
the just and honest and law-abiding man of whatever class. It
would stand, in fact, where the middle class felt itself to be
standing — in the middle, on neutral ground among self-seeking
interests of all kinds. The government’s heightened power was
to represent not its more intimate linkage with any of these
interests, but rather its ability with greater effectuality to stand
above them, and where necessary against them.

The first major political leader to understand this need of the

233

Chapter vi: The Struggle over Organization

public for faith in the complete neutrality of the powerful state
was Theodore Roosevelt, whose intuitive sense of the impor-
tance of this motive, as well as his genuine personal sympathy
with it, explains much of his popularity. 9 In this respect the most
important year of his presidency was 1902, when he brought
the great anthracite strike to a successful arbitration and
launched the prosecution of the Northern Securities Company.
These moves, by suggesting that the country at last had a
President capable of taking a strong and independent stand
in such matters, gave people confidence. They were symbolic
acts of the highest importance. 1 While previous Presidents had
intervened in labor disputes — Hayes, for instance, in the rail-
road strikes of 1877, Cleveland in the Pullman strike — it had
been as partisans of the captains of industry, not as an inde-
pendent force representing a neutral view and the “public’
interest. Now T. R. seemed in the public eye to stand not only

9 No one familiar with T. R.’s writings will fail to recognize the asser-
tion of this impulse in his vigorously equivocal rhetoric. “This sums up my
whole attitude in the matter. . . . [it] is, after all, simply the question of
treating each man, rich or poor, on his merits, and making him feel that at
the White House, which is the Nation’s property, all reputable citizens of
the Nation are sure of like treatment.” The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt ,
ed by Eltmg R. Monson, Vol. IV (Cambridge, 1951), p. 880. “ . . the
success of such suits as that against the Northern Securities Company
which gave a guaranty in this country that rich man and poor man alike
were held equS before the law, and my action m the so-called Miller case
which gave to trades-unions a lesson that had been taught corporations —
that I favored them while they did right and was not in the least afraid of
them when they did wrong.” Ibid., p. 993. “At the same time I wished the
labor people absolutely to understand that I set my face like flint against
violence and lawlessness of any kind on their part, just as much as agamst
arrogant greed by the rich, and that I would be as quick to move against
one as the other ” Ibid , Vol III, p. 482. There are scores of similar ut-
terances m T. R.’s public and private writings. For a penetrating analysis
of T. R.’s presidential role see John Morton Blum: The Republican Roose-
velt (Cambridge, 1954).

1 The character of such action was also recognized by Roosevelt’s friend
Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. “You have no power or authority, of course,”
he wrote to the President as the coal crisis grew acute. “. . Is there any-

thing we can appear to do?” Henry Cabot Lodge, ed. : Selections from the
Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge , 1884-
1918 (New York, 1925), Vol. I, pp. 528-32; italics added.

234

THE AGE OF REFORM

apart from but above the opposing sides. During the course of
the negotiations that led up to the final compromise, he loomed
larger than either the mine workers or the operators. At first he
saw his independence as the source of a considerable disadvan-
tage: "Unfortunately the strength of my public position before
the country is also its weakness,” he wrote to Lodge. "I am
genuinely independent of the big monied men in all matters
where I think the interests of the public are concerned, and
probably I am the first President of recent times of whom this
could be truthfully said. I think it right and desirable that this
should be true of the President. But where I do not grant any
favors to these big monied men which I do not think the country
requires that they should have, it is out of the question for me
to expect them to grant favors to me in return. . . . The sum
of this is that I can make no private or special appeal to them,
and I am at my wits’ end how to proceed.” 2

In fact T. R/s wits were much more with him than he had
imagined — and so were the sympathies of a few of the big
moneyed men. Ironically, it was Mark Hanna and J. Pierpont
Morgan, both of them paramount symbols to the public of the
bloated plutocracy, whose help and influence made the ultimate
settlement possible, 3 for without them the obstinate mine op-
erators might never have been prevailed upon to agree to arbi-
tration. Nor did Hanna or Morgan expect in return any direct
and immediate "favors” of the sort Roosevelt felt he could not
grant. His own conduct in the affair, after all, was intended to
fend off widespread suffering, mass discontent, possible mob
violence, a potential sympathetic general strike, and perhaps
even "socialistic action,” 4 and he appealed to these men prima-
rily in their capacity as responsible conservatives who might be

2 The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt , Vol. Ill, p 332.

3 See T. R/s cordial letters of thanks to both men, ibid., pp. 353, 354.
The whole episode, which is enormously instructive, can be followed in
T. R/s letters, ibid., pp. 323-66.

4 Ibid., p. 337; cf. pp. 329-30, 336, 338, 340-1, 349, 357, 360, 362-3.

235

Chapter vi: The Struggle over Organization

able to bead off a social disaster. In the public mind the incident
redounded much to Roosevelt’s credit, and properly so. The
historian, however, cannot refrain from adding that it ill ac-
corded with the stereotypes of Progressive thinking that “Dollar
Mark” Hanna and J. P. Morgan should have attended as mid-
wives at the birth of the neutral state.

The psychological impact of the Northern Securities prosecu-
tion was comparable to that of the strike settlement, though the
economic content was relatively meaningless. This great railroad
merger, which had been consummated only after a spectacular
war for control between financial forces directed by E. H. Har-
riman and others directed by James J. Hill and Morgan, had
brought about a frightful financial panic in which a great many
personal fortunes were made and unmade. Of necessity the new
combination had attracted a great deal of public attention, and
it was everywhere known as a Morgan interest. To move for its
dissolution, though hardly a blow at any vital concern either of
Morgan or of the business community, was to appear to chal-
lenge the dragon in his den. ( And indeed Morgan, offended be-
cause he had not been informed in advance, came bustling down
to Washington to find out if T. R. intended “to attack my other
interests.”) The government's suit encouraged everyone to feel
at last that the President of the United States was really bigger
and more powerful than Morgan and the Morgan interests, that
the country was governed from Washington and not from Wall
Street. Roosevelt was immensely gratified when the dissolution
was finally upheld by the Supreme Court in 1904, and he had
every right to be — not because he had struck a blow at business
consolidation, for the decree was ineffective and consolidation
went on apace, but because for the first time in the history of
the presidency he had done something to ease the public mind
on this vital issue. It was, he said, “one of the great achieve-
ments” of his first administration, “for through it we emphasized
in signal fashion, as in no other way could be emphasized, the

236

THE AGE OF REFORM

fact that the most powerful men in this country were held to
accountability before the law.” 5 6 Henceforth, whatever he might
do or say, a large part of the public persisted in thinking of him
as a “trust-buster.”

Representing as they did the spirit and the desires of the
middle class, the Progressives stood for a dual program of eco-
nomic remedies designed to minimize the dangers from the
extreme left and right. On one side they feared the power of
the plutocracy, on the other the poverty and restlessness of the
masses. But if political leadership could be firmly restored to
the responsible middle classes who were neither ultra-reaction-
ary nor, in T. R.’s phrase, "wild radicals,” both of these problems
could be met. The first fine of action was to reform the business
order, to restore or maintain competition — or, as the case might
be, to limit and regulate monopoly — and expand credit in the
interests of the consumer, the farmer, and the small business-
man. The second was to minimize the most outrageous and in-
defensible exploitation of the working population, to cope with
what was commonly called "the social question.” The relations
of capital and labor, the condition of the masses in the slums,
the exploitation of the labor of women and children, the neces-
sity of establishing certain minimal standards of social decency
— these problems filled them with concern both because they
felt a sincere interest in the welfare of the victims of industrial-
ism and because they feared that to neglect them would invite
social disintegration and ultimate catastrophe. They were filled
with a passion for social justice, but they also hoped that social
justice could be brought about, as it were, conspicuously. Men
like Roosevelt were often furious at the plutocrats because their

5 Ibid., Vol. IV, p. 886. Some years later he admitted, in effect, that the
intangible, ceremonial consequences of the prosecution — i.e., establishing
“the principle that the government was supreme over the great corpora-
tions^ — were the only consequences. Works , Memorial Edition ( New York,

1923-6), Vol. XIX, p. 448; cf. Outlook , Vol. CII (September 21, 1912),
p. 105.

237

Chapter vi: The Struggle over Organization

luxury, their arrogance, and the open, naked exercise of their
power constituted a continual provocation to the people and
always increased the likelihood that social resentments would
find expression in radical or even “socialistic” programs.

Writing to Taft in 1906 about the tasks of American political
leadership as he envisaged them for the next quarter century,
Roosevelt declared: “I do not at all like the social conditions at
present. The dull, purblind folly of the very rich men; their
greed and arrogance, and the way in which they have unduly
prospered by the help of the ablest lawyers, and too often
through the weakness or shortsightedness of the judges or by
their unfortunate possession of meticulous minds; these facts,
and the corruption in business and politics, have tended to pro-
duce a very unhealthy condition of excitement and irritation in
the popular mind, which shows itself in part in the enormous
increase in the socialistic propaganda. Nothing effective, be-
cause nothing at once honest and intelligent, is being done to
combat the great amount of evil which, mixed with a little good,
a little truth, is contained in the outpourings of the Cosmopoli-
tan , of McClure's , of Colliers , of Tom Lawson, of David Graham
Phillips, of Upton Sinclair. Some of these are socialists; some of
them merely lurid sensationalists; but they are all building up
a revolutionary feeling which will most probably take the form
of a political campaign. Then we may have to do, too late or
almost too late, what had to be done in the silver campaign
when in one summer we had to convince a great many good
people that what they had been laboriously taught for several
years previous was untrue.” 6

Roosevelt represented, of course, the type of Progressive
leader whose real impulses were deeply conservative, and who

6 The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt , Vol. V, pp. 183-4. It hardly needs
to be said that Roosevelt was unduly concerned. The writers he mentioned
were doing far more to build up support for him among the public than
they were to create “revolutionary feeling.” Six years later Roosevelt him-
self was building up a “revolutionary feeling” about as menacing as that
created by the Cosmopolitan et al.

238

THE AGE OF REFORM

might not perhaps have been a Progressive at all if it were not
for the necessity of fending off more radical threats to estab-
lished ways of doing tilings. The characteristic Progressive
thinker carried on a tolerant and mutually profitable dialogue
with the Socialists of the period, perhaps glancing over his
shoulder with some anxiety from time to time, to be sure that
Marxian or Fabian ideas were not gaining too much ground in
the United States, but chiefly because in this age of broad social
speculation he was interested to learn what he could from
Socialist criticism. Fundamentally, however, the influence of
such criticism was negative: if the Socialist said that the grow-
ing combinations of capital were natural products of social evo-
lution and that the challenge they represented to democracy
must be met by expropriating their owners, the typical Progres-
sive was only spurred all the more to find ways of limiting or
regulating monopoly within a capitalist framework; when the
Socialist said that the grievances of the people could be relieved
only under Socialism, the typical Progressive became the more
determined to find ways of showing that these grievances were
remediable under capitalism. In these ways the alleged “threat”
of Socialism, much talked about in the Progressive period, actu-
ally gave added impetus to middle-class programs . 7

7 The growth of Socialist sentiment had greater leverage than it is usu-
ally credited with on the more conservative politicians of the Progressive
era. It enabled a man like T. R. to argue more plausibly that the sort of
moderate and gradual reform he stood for was urgently needed, over the
long run, to stave off more drastic forms of protest. Of course, few of the
more ardently Progressive men of the age were much worried by the ad-
vancing interest m Socialism Many of them saw m it simply another vari-
ant of the general protest rather than a genuine interest m creatmg a So-
cialist society. Cf. Wilson: The New Freedom , pp. 26-7. The general inter-
est in Socialist speculation is attested by the attention paid to Sociahst
muclcrakers and publicists such as W. J. Ghent, Robert Hunter, Jack Lon-
don, Gustavus Myers, Algie M. Simons, Upton Sinclair, John Spargo, and
William English Walling Eugene Debs’s vote in the presidential elections
rose from 94,000 in 1900 to 402,000 and 420,000 in the succeeding cam-
paigns and finally to 897,000 m 1912, which represented the highest figure
and the largest percentage ( almost 6 per cent ) ever received by a Sociahst
Party candidate. While voters raiely sent Socialists to Congress or the state
legislatures, they frequently put them into municipal offices, largely in con-

239

Chapter vi: The Struggle over Organization

At bottom, the central fear was fear of power, and the greater
the strength of an organized interest, the greater the anxiety it
aroused. Hence it was the trusts, the investment banking houses,
the interlocking directorates, the swollen private fortunes, that
were most criticized, and after them the well-knit, highly disci-
plined political machines. The labor unions, being far weaker
than the big businesses and the machines, held an ambiguous
place in Progressive thinking. The Progressive sympathized with
the problems of labor, but was troubled about the lengths to
which union power might go if labor-unionism became the sole
counterpoise to the power of business. The danger of combina-
tions of capital and labor that would squeeze the consu min g
public and the small businessman was never entirely out of
sight. The rise in the price of coal after the anthracite strike
aroused much public concern. And wherever labor was genu-
inely powerful in politics — as it was, for instance, in San Fran-
cisco, a closed-shop town where labor for a time dominated the
local government — Progressivism took on a somewhat anti-labor
tinge. 8

Where the labor movement was of no more than moderate
strength, and where it clearly represented the middle-class aspi-
rations of native workers and of business unionism, it was read-
ily accepted, if only as a minor third partner in the alliance
between agrarians and the urban middle class that constituted
the Progressive movement. Those Progressives who lived in the

nection with protest against local corruption. By May 1912, 1,039 Socialists
had been elected to office, including 56 mayors, 160 councilmen, and 145
aldermen. The Socialist press had grown to the point at which there were
eight foreign-language and five English dailies, and 262 English and 36
foreign-language weeklies. J. A. Way land's Socialist weekly. Appeal to
Reason , winch was published in Kansas, reached a circulation of 500,000.
On Socialist political successes see R. F. Hoxie: “The Rising Tide of So-
cialism,” Journal of Political Economy , Vol. XIX (October 1911), pp.
609--31, and Daniel Bell; “Marxian Socialism m the Umted States,” pp.
259, 283-4, and passim .

8 For the situation m San Francisco see the excellent account by Walton
Bean: Boss Ruef’s San Francisco (Berkeley, 1952); George Mowry: The
California Progressives , p. 295, points to a similar development in Los
Angeles during a period of labor mihtancy.

240 THE AGE OF REFORM

midst of industrial squalor and strife seem to have felt that the
best way of meeting the "social question* * was through means
more benevolently disinterested than those of direct labor ac-
tion. Here again the ideal of the neutral state came into play, for
it was expected that the state, dealing out evenhanded justice,
would meet the gravest complaints. Industrial society was to be
humanized through law, a task that was largely undertaken in
the state legislatures. In the years following 1900 an impressive
body of legislation was passed dealing with workmen’s compen-
sation, the labor of women and children, hours of work, mini-
mum wages for women, and old-age pensions. 9 Even when
much allowance is made for spottiness in administration and
enforcement, and for the toll that judicial decisions took of them,
the net effect of these laws in remedying the crassest abuses of
industrialism was very considerable. Today it is perhaps neces-
sary to make a strong effort of the imagination to recall the in-
dustrial barbarism that was being tamed — to realize how much,
for instance, workmens compensation meant at a time when
every year some 16,000 or 17,000 trainmen (about one out of
every ten or twelve workers so classified) were injured. The
insistence that the power of law be brought to bear against such
gratuitous suffering is among our finest inheritances from the
Progressive movement.

Progressivism was effective, moreover, not only for the laws
it actually passed but for the pressure it put on business to
match public reform with private improvements. American busi-
ness itself had entered a new phase. Before the 1890’s it had
been too much absorbed in the problems of plant construction,
expanding markets, and falling prices to pay much attention to
either the efficiency or the morale of its working force. American
plant management had been backward. But in the early twenti-
eth century thoughtful American businessmen, pressed by the
threat of union organization, condemned by muckrakers, and

9 This legislation is summarized in John R. Commons, ed.: History of
Labor in the United States , Vol. Ill ( New York, 1935 ) .

241

Chaptek vi: The Struggle over Organization

smarting under comparisons with the most efficient managers
in Europe, began to address themselves to poor working condi-
tions and employee morale and to the reformation of their hap-
hazard shop methods. 1 Between 1900 and 1910, 240 volumes on
business management were published. Frederick Winslow Tay-
lor’s interest in efficiency was popularized among businessmen.
The emerging business schools, nonexistent in the country be-
fore 1898, provided numerous new agencies for discussion, edu-
cation, and research in the field of management. Employers
began to study personnel problems, consider devices for cutting
fatigue and improving work conditions, and launched in some
cases upon their own welfare and pension programs and profit-
sharing schemes. 2 Much of this was resisted by labor unions as
an attempt to set up a system of paternalistic control, and much
was indeed associated with the fostering of company unions.
Few employers went as far as Edward A. Filene in encouraging
labor participation in managerial decisions. But the whole Pro-
gressive atmosphere did help to give rise to a system of private
welfare capitalism alongside the statutory system of business
regulation that was growing up. During and after the first
World War this private system developed with notable rapidity.

So far as those important intangibles of political tone were
concerned in which so many Progressives were deeply inter-
ested, they won a significant victory, for they heightened the
level of human sympathy in the American political and eco-
nomic system. One of the primary tests of the mood of a society
at any given time is whether its comfortable people tend to
identify, psychologically, with the power and achievements of
the very successful or with the needs and sufferings of the un-
derprivileged. In a large and striking measure the Progressive
agitations turned the human sympathies of the people down-

1 On this movement see Cochran and Miller: The Age of Enterprise,
pp. 243-8, and Commons, op. cit , Vol. Ill, section III.

2 See the comments on this movement in W. J. Ghent: Our Benevolent
Feudalism , pp. 59-66.

242

THE AGE OF REFORM

ward rather than upward in the social scale. The Progressives,
by creating a climate of opinion in which, over the long run, the
comfortable public was disposed to be humane, did in the end
succeed in fending off that battle of social extremes of which
they were so afraid. Thanks in part to their efforts, the United
States took its place alongside England and the Scandinavian
countries among those nations in which the upper and middle
classes accepted the fundamental legitimacy of labor aspiration
and labor-unionism, and took a different path from those coun-
tries of the Continent where the violence of class antagonism
and class struggle was heightened by the moral rejection of
Labor. To realize the importance of the change in the United
States itself, one need only think of the climate of opinion in
which the Pullman strike and the Homestead strike were fought
out and compare it with the atmosphere in which labor organi-
zation has taken place since the Progressive era. There has of
course been violence and bloodshed, but in the twentieth cen-
tury a massive labor movement has been built with far less cost
in these respects than it cost the American working class merely
tp man the machines of American industry in the period from
1865 to 1900.

Although the Progressives were thus capable, except in spe-
cial instances, of coming to terms with the organization of labor,
the objective problem as well as the confusing mixture of feel-
ings involved in their approach to business organization gave
them far greater trouble. While the Progressive citizen was
alarmed at the threat to economic competition and political
democracy, he was also respectful of order, aware of prosperity,
and cautious about launching any drastic attack upon propertied
institutions. While he was hostile to private business power, he
also admired bigness, efficiency, and success. While he was de-
voted to the moral virtues and believed in the material benefits
of price competition, he was also willing to reckon with social
change, and he worshipped that god of progress which the

243

Chapter vi: The Struggle over Organization

consolidation of business was said by many men to represent.

The Progressive discussion of the so-called trust or monopoly
question is therefore filled with all that uneasiness and incon-
sistency which we may expect to see when men find themselves
enmeshed in institutions and practices that seem to be working
to considerable effect but that violate their inherited precepts
and their moral preferences. When a social problem is, in
its largest aspects, insoluble, as this one was, and when the feel-
ings aroused over it are as urgent as the feelings of the Progres-
sive generation, what usually happens is that men are driven
to find a purely ceremonial solution. Among later generations,
which do not approach the problem in the same way or have
feelings of the same urgency about it, such ceremonial solutions
are a temptation to the satirical intelligence. But we must be
wary of falling too readily into that easy condescension which
one may feel when speaking with hindsight about the problems
of an earlier age. Since we no longer experience with anything
like the same intensity some of the Progressives’ anxieties or
their sense of loss, we have outgrown the problem of business
organization that they faced: and in so far as we recognize it as
a real problem — as we do, for instance, in relation to the preser-
vation of democracy — we have by no means solved it.

From the very beginning, at any rate, when the Sherman
Anti-Trust Act was passed in 1890, it was recognized by most
of the astute politicians of that hour as a gesture, a ceremonial
concession to an overwhelming public demand for some kind
of reassuring action against the trusts. Senator Orville Platt was
candid enough to say at the time that it was just the result of a
desire "to get some bill headed: ‘A Bill to Punish Trusts’ with
which to go to the country.” 3 Before the time of Theodore
Roosevelt’s presidency very little attempt had been made, and
negligible results had been achieved, in employing the act to
check business consolidations, and the Supreme Court had al-

3 L. A. Coolidge: An Old-fashioned Senator: Orville H. Platt (New
York, 1910), p. 444.

244

THE AGE OF REFORM

ready made it clear that enforcement would be no simple mat-
ter. T. R., as we have seen, dramatized the issue in his Northern
Securities prosecution, which was followed in time by a few
other selected prosecutions of comparable public-relations value.
The readiness with which his reputation as a "trust-buster” — a
reputation that despite all the efforts of the historians still clings
to his name — grew up around these prosecutions is itself striking
testimony to the public's need to believe in the effectiveness of
action in this sphere; 4 for not only did T. R. fail to prosecute
many trusts, and fail to check the accelerating business con-
solidation that occurred during his administrations, but he did
not even believe in the trust-busting philosophy and he was
utterly and constantly candid in saying so in his presidential
messages and other public statements. He inveighed regularly
and with asperity against attempting "the impossible task of
restoring the flintlock conditions of business sixty years ago by
trusting only to a succession of lawsuits under the antitrust
law. , . ” 5 "The man who advocates destroying the trusts,” he
said early in his presidency, "by measures which would paralyze
the industries of the country is at least a quack and at worst an
enemy to the Republic .” 6 Lacking faith in the viability or work-
ability of all efforts to restore the old competitive order, he
urged, as did those Progressive intellectuals who followed the
lead of Herbert Croly, that the whole system of organization
be accepted as a product of modern life, and that such efforts
as must be made to control and check overgrown organization
be carried out along the lines of counter-organization: "A simple
and poor society can exist as a democracy on a basis of sheer
individualism. But a rich and complex industrial society cannot

4 It was characteristic of the age that Taft, who started twice as many
anti-trust actions as T. R., but had not half his gift for dramatization, was
not thought of as a trust-buster.

5 Works, Memorial Edition (New York, 1923-6), Vol. XIX, p. 401; this
was his speech before the Progressive National Convention of 1912.

6 Presidential Addresses and State Papers (New York, 1910), Vol. I,
p. 139, from a speech at Fitchburg, Massachusetts, September 2, 1902.

245

Chapter vi: The Struggle over Organization

so exist; for some individuals, and especially those artificial in-
dividuals called corporations, become so very big that the ordi-
nary individual . . . cannot deal with them on terms of equal-
ity. It therefore becomes necessary for these ordinary individuals
to combine in their turn, first in order to act in their collective
capacity through that biggest of all combinations called the
government, and second, to act also in their own self-defense,
through private combinations, such as farmers’ associations and
trade unions.” 7

These remarks come as close as a brief statement could do to
foreshadowing the important developments in this sphere since
Roosevelt’s time. It was his belief that while business combi-
nations should be accepted and recognized, their affairs, their
acts and earnings, should be exposed to publicity; and that they
should be subject to regulation and be punished when they were
“bad.” The Bureau of Corporations, which was created at his
instance in 1903, did in fact carry out useful studies of the con-
duct of a number of major industries, including lumber, meat-
packing, oil, steel, and tobacco. Roosevelt seems to have thought
of the Bureau of Corporations as the tentative beginning of a
somewhat more effective system of regulation, whose ultimate
form was, not surprisingly, rather vague in his mind. 8 As time
passed, however, he put more and more emphasis on the dis-
tinction between good and bad trusts. Monopoly power itself
was not to be the object of concern, but only such monopoly
or near-monopoly as was achieved or maintained by unfair
methods. This distinction might be difficult to realize satisfacto-
rily in positive law — but such a consideration seems not to have
concerned him. The facilities of the Antitrust Division of the
Department of Justice were limited to five attorneys working
with a budget of about $100,000 a year. By definition, since only
a handful of suits could be undertaken each year, there could

7 John Morton Blum: The Republican Roosevelt , p. 110, for a more
elaborate statement of this argument, see Herbert Croly: The Fromise of
American Life (New York, 1909), esp. chapter xii.

8 The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt , Vol. Ill, pp. 591-2, 680.

246

THE AGE OF REFORM

hardly be very many “bad” businesses. Such was the situation
as T. R. left it during his presidency.

Despite the efforts of President Taft to put some force into
the anti-trust movement, public dissatisfaction continued to
grow, as the appetite for the regulation of business consolidation
seemed to enlarge with such small evidences of success as the
politicians were able to produce. There was a growing aware-
ness of the danger of what Wilson called “a combination of the
combinations” — the union of all the great business interests un-
der the leadership of the chief investment banking houses. More
and more Americans were coming to the conclusion that what
had been done thus far did not go nearly deep enough. The view
expressed by Herbert Croly, T. R., Charles H. Van Hise, and
some others that monopoly must be accepted and regulated
may have had widespread appeal among many lawyers, intel-
lectuals, and the more sophisticated businessmen, but it was
probably not the predominant sentiment among those who had
strong feelings about the matter. The idea of Brandeis, Wilson,
La Follette, and Bryan that a real effort should be made to re-
store, maintain, and regulate competition rather than regulate
monopoly seems to have been more congenial to the country at
large, to most of the reformers, and especially to rural people
and small businessmen in the West and South, where Populist
anti-monopoly traditions had some strength. 9 No doubt it was
this large public that Vice-President Thomas R. Marshall had
in mind when he declared in 1913: “The people were told in
the last campaign that trusts were a natural evolution, and that
the only way to deal with them was to regulate them. The peo-
ple are tired of being told such things. What they want is the
kind of opportunity that formerly existed in this country” 1

9 George Mowry points out that Roosevelt's paternalistic philosophy,
with its acceptance of regulated consolidation, its labor reforms, and its
protective tariff had more urban than rural appeal, and that in the eighteen
largest cities he ran 10 per cent ahead of his vote m the country at large.
Theodore Roosevelt ana the Progressive Movement, p. 280.

1 Quoted m William English Walling: Progressivism and After (New
York, 1914), p. 104.

247

Chapter vi: The Struggle over Organization

This remark summarizes the issue of business consolidation as
it had been dramatized in the election campaign of 1912. Both
Wilson and Roosevelt ran on platforms so generally Progressive
that only their difference on the trust issue clearly marked them
off from each other. The issue, as Brandeis put it, was regulated
competition versus regulated monopoly, and although it was
vigorously debated in these terms, giving strong expression to
the feelings of the two schools of thought, it is doubtful that the
difference was in fact as sharp as the debate made it seem. To
be sure, men like Wilson and La Follette at times seemed really
to believe that the tide of business consolidation could be swept
back by Sherman Act methods. La Follette declared in 1912
that “the executive could have saved the people from the appall-
ing conditions which confront us today, if all the power of this
government had been put forth to enforce the [Sherman] Anti-
Trust law.” 2 Wilson asserted in the same year that the com-
munity of business interests by which the United States was in
danger of being governed was “something for the law to pull
apart, and gently, but firmly and persistently dissect” 3 — a threat
that raises the image of a surgical president, perhaps with
Brandeis and La Follette in attendance, exercising his scalpel
over the palpitating body of the American business community.

In fact Wilson’s approach was not so straightforward or un-
equivocal as this menacing surgical metaphor suggests — for
he too recognized that “the elaboration of business upon a great
co-operative scale is characteristic of our time and has come
about by the natural operation of modem civilization,” and
admitted that “we shall never return to the old order of indi-
vidual competition, and that the organization of business upon
a grand scale of cooperation is, up to a certain point, itself nor-
mal and inevitable.” 4 While he believed deeply in the little

2 Autobiography , pp. 704—5.

8 The New Freedom , p. 188.

4 Ibid., p. 163; William Diamond: The Economic Thought of Woodrow
Wilson (Baltimore, 1943), p. 108.

248

THE AGE OF REFORM

entrepreneur and in competition, he rested his hope in what he
called "free competition/' not in "illicit competition/' Free com-
petition was anything that promoted the victory of superior
efficiency, while illicit competition was the use of unfair means
to surpass competitors by firms that were not actually more
efficient. Wilson had to admit that free competition, too, would
kill competitors, and that these competitors would be just as
dead as those killed by illicit competition. But in such cases the
net result would be good, because it would add to the total
efficiency of the nation’s production. Thus a big business that
grew big through superior efficiency was good; only one that
grew big by circumventing honest competition was bad. 5 "I am
for big business," said Wilson in one of his more inscrutable
sentences, "and I am against the trusts." 6 But no one, not even
Brandeis, knew how to define or measure superior efficiency, or
to draw a line in the progress toward bigness beyond which a
business would lose rather than gain in efficiency. While it was
possible to draw up a list of business practices that most honest
men would agree to condemn, no one knew a constructive or
responsible way of dissolving great businesses that had already
grown up by employing just such practices. No one knew how
to make empirical sense out of Wilson’s distinction between the
big business he favored and the trusts he disliked. And no one
could be sure that there was any real working difference be-
tween the distinction T. R. made between good and bad trusts
and the distinction Wilson made between free and illicit com-
petition.

A Progressive voter who felt impelled to take a rational view
of the trust question might well have been confused, and may
have wondered whether the warm debate expressed a really
profound difference between the candidates. In fact, by the time
of the 1912 campaign the decisions of the Supreme Court had

6 See the discussion of “Monopoly or Opportunity/’ The New Freedom ,
chapter viii.

® Ibid., p. 180.

249

Chapter vi: The Struggle over Organization

already whittled the Sherman Act down to the point at which
it was no longer possible to imagine that the law could be —
without a juridical revolution — an instrument for a broad frontal
attack on business consolidation . 7 What remained was the pos-
sibility that particular businesses guilty of flagrantly unfair com-
petition could occasionally be singled out for action — a proce-
dure not signally different from the Rooseveltian distinction
between good and bad trusts. What is perhaps most worthy of
comment is that the further anti-trust legislation of the Wilson
administration, the Clayton Act and the creation of the Federal
Trade Commission, did not include any provisions aimed at
circumventing the Supreme Court’s extremely damaging ap-
proach to anti-trust suits. Nor was any serious effort made by
Wilson to launch a vigorous policy. Under him the Antitrust
Division was expanded, but only to eighteen men — and even
this was done only after wartime conditions had sent prices
sky-high. ( The most elementary policing of the economy, more
recent experience has shown, calls for a staff of well over ten
times as many attorneys. 8 ) Wilson also disappointed those who
hoped that the Federal Trade Commission would become an
effective agency of regulation by choosing commissioners who
were either ineffectual or primarily interested in making the

7 Tins was completely clear after the American Tobacco Company and
the Standard Oil cases, both decided in 1911, as a consequence of the ap-
plication of the “rule of reason” to anti-trust suits. In his dissenting opinion
m the latter case Mr Justice Harlan declared that the Court had oy mere
interpretation, modified the act of Congress, and deprived it of practical
value as a defensive measure against the evils to be remedied.” This was
the view generally taken of these decisions by the anti-trust reformers.

8 When the Antitrust Division was revived under Franklin D. Roose-
velt after 1938, with the intention not of launching a frontal attack on
consolidation but of policing price pohcies and competitive practices, it
acquired a force of about 250 lawyers and economists. The Securities and
Exchange Commission needs a personnel of over 1,200 to carry out its work
today. Walton Hamilton and Irene Till. Antitrust in Action , T N E C.
Monograph No. 16 (Washmgton, 1941), pp. 23-6 gives a good brief ac-
count of the historic non-enforcement of the Sherman Act; cf. Walton
Hamilton: The Pattern of Competition (New York, 1940), pp 58-82, on
difficulties and limitations of enforcement, and Thurman Arnold: The Bot-
tlenecks of Business (New York, 1940), esp. chapter vm.

250

THE AGE OF REFORM

agency useful to business. 9 Brandeis, who had helped to draft
the act creating the Federal Trade Commission, later dismissed
its management under Wilson as 4 a stupid administration.” 1

No one who follows the trust question at the level of both
public discussion and legislative action can fail to be impressed
by the disparity between the two: the discussions were so
momentous in their character and so profound — for nothing less
was at stake than the entire organization of American business
and American politics, the very question of who was to control
the country — and the material results were by comparison so
marginal, so incomplete, so thoroughly blocked at all the major
strategic points. It is impossible not to conclude that, despite
the widespread public agitation over the matter, the men who
took a conservative view of the needs of the hour never lost
control. It was not merely that, on the main issues to be adjudi-
cated, the Supreme Court stood with them, but that the execu-
tive leaders who occupied the White House and the sober gentry
of the Senate were in the final analysis quite reliable. It proved
impossible for men like Bryan and La Follette, who did not
enjoy the confidence of at least large segments of the business
community, to find their way to the White House; and the con-
siderable influence that these men had throughout the country
was carefully filtered through the hands of more conservative
politicians before it was embodied in legislative or administra-
tive action. A leader like Theodore Roosevelt, and with him
several prominent Republicans, who understood the urgency of
Progressive sentiments, knew also how to act as a balance wheel
between what he considered to be the most irresponsible forces
of left and right. (In 1912 George Roosevelt remarked to him
that whereas earlier he had been the progressive leader of the
conservatives, he was now the conservative leader of the pro-
gressives. “‘Yes, yes/ T. R. muttered, as he rocked back and

9 Arthur S. Link: Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era (New York,
1954), pp. 70-5.

251

Chapter vi: The Struggle over Organization

forth in his favorite rocking chair, 'that’s it. I have to hold them
in check all the time. I have to restrain them.’ ” 2 )

Historians have long been aware how T. R., while enjoying
the support and indeed even on occasion whipping up the senti-
ments of the insurgent forces in American life, turned for advice
in the solution of his problems to the great conservative leaders
in the Senate and to the great spokesmen of Eastern industry
and finance capital; and how much support he accepted for his
campaigns from the financial interests whose custodians these
men always were. Woodrow Wilson had a different tempera-
ment, and in his administration the same forces worked in a
somewhat roundabout way. To preserve his own sense of integ-
rity, Wilson had fewer direct dealings with the captains of in-
dustry and finance; but his closest adviser. Colonel House, be-
came a personal agent through whom the needs and views of
capital could be expressed to the White House, and House’s
diary records frequent conferences with J. P. Morgan, Felix M.
Warburg, Henry Clay Frick, Francis L. Higginson, Otto H.
Kahn, and Frank Vanderlip. 3 Moreover, when a depression de-
veloped late in 1913 which grew more serious in the following
year, Wilson himself began openly and assiduously to cultivate
the support of business, began to welcome bankers and business
leaders back to the White House, and issued unequivocal reas-
surances to the effect that the wave of reform legislation was
nearing its end. 4 Progressive intellectuals, who were familiar
with the praise Herbert Croly had lavished upon the circum-
spect Roosevelt, must have been bemused to see this editor
scold Woodrow Wilson in 1914 for his failure to go very far
with the program of Progressive reform. 5

But to say all this about the ceremonial function of the agita-

2 Nicholas Roosevelt: A Front Row Seat (Norman, Oklahoma, 1953),
p. 53.

3 Matthew Josephson: The President Makers (New York, 1940), is most
penetrating on this aspect of Progressive politics.

4 Arthur S. Link- Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era , pp. 75-9.

6 Ibid., pp. 79-30.

252

THE AGE OF REFORM

tion over big business should not divert us from our search for
its other uses. The relations of the reform movement to business
were not limited to the effort to restore competition or check
monopoly. There were other, more pragmatic reforms under
consideration; and it was the effect of all the monitory writing
and speaking, and all the heated agitation over the trusts and
their threat to democracy and enterprise and liberty, to throw
big business and the vested interests on the defensive and to
create a climate of public opinion in which some reform legis-
lation was possible. The Progressives may not have been able to
do much about business consolidation, but they did manage, in
the Hepburn Act, to take the first step toward genuine regulation
of the railroads, a thing long overdue; they did manage, in the
creation of the Federal Reserve System, to establish a more
satisfactory system of credit subject to public control; they did
bring about, in the Underwood tariff, a long-sought downward
revision of duties; and on a number of fronts, both state and
national, they won other legislative reforms of real value to
farmers and workers and the consuming public that would have
been far more difficult to achieve in a social atmosphere un-
affected by the widespread demand to challenge the power of
big business.

In a number of ways the problem of business consolidation
now presents itself, even to liberals and reformers, in different
forms from those in which it appeared to the men of the Pro-
gressive generation. Fewer men by far experience the passing
of independent entrepreneurship with the same anguish. The
process of capital formation has changed in such a way as to
reduce the importance of the investment banking houses and
thus to lay the specter of the money trust. Product competition
has in some respects replaced the old price competition. The
great distributive agencies, themselves giant concerns, have
given consumers some protection from the exactions of monop-
oly. Big business has shown itself to be what the Progressives
of the Brandeis school resolutely denied it would be — techno-

253

Chapter vi: The Struggle over Organization

logically more progressive than the smaller units it has replaced.
The political power of capital has been more satisfactorily
matched by an enormous growth in labor organization. The very
dissociation of ownership from control, so alarming to the Pro-
gressives, has created a class of salaried managers who have a
stake in their own respectability and civic comfort that is as
large as or greater than their stake in profits-at-any-cost. It is
conceivable that such men may continue to show more indus-
trial flexibility than the hard-pressed entrepreneurs of old-fash-
ioned enterprise could afford.

None the less, subsequent generations of Americans still owe
a great debt to the anti-trust inheritance they hold from the
Progressive era. The rise of big business may have been inevi-
table, but if so it was salutary that it should have taken place
in a climate of opinion that threw it intermittently on the de-
fensive. Even Thurman Arnold, whose name is conspicuously
identified with the argument that the chief effect of the anti-
trust rhetoric "was to promote the growth of great industrial
organizations by deflecting the attack on them into purely moral
and ceremonial channels ,” 6 had to concede, when he elaborated
this thesis in The Folklore of Capitalism , that the same anti-
trust rhetoric, by encouraging the notion that great corporations
could be disciplined and made respectable, had something
to do with the fact that they finally did become respectable;
and that without the presence of hostile laws the pricing
policies of big business might have been a good deal more
unfavorable to the public interest . 7 His own subsequent career
as Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Antitrust Divi-
sion of the Department of Justice was, in a broad historical
sense, built upon intangibles of sentiment inherited from the
Progressives and their anti-monopoly predecessors. For even
though he and the other planners of the latter-day New Deal

6 Thurman Arnold. The Folklore of Capitalism (New Haven, 1937),
p. 212; the thesis seems to have been foreshadowed by C. H. Van Hise:
Concentration and Control , p. 233.

7 Arnold, op. cit, pp. 221, 228.

254

THE AGE OF REFORM

movement against monopoly planned no such general assault
on bigness as was foreshadowed in the more exalted campaign
talk of the Brandeis-Wilson school, they did rely upon political
sentiments that the Progressives had nourished and strength-
ened. Franz Neumann, examining the conditions that led to
the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis
in Germany, pointed out that in Germany there had never been
anything like a popular anti-monopoly movement such as the
United States experienced under Theodore Roosevelt and Wood-
row Wilson, that the middle classes had not been articulate
against the cartels and the trusts, and that labor, looking at
concentration through Marxist eyes, had consistently favored
it. This, he suggests, weakened the opposition, within the busi-
ness order, to authoritarian controls. This comparison suggests
another respect in which the anti-trust tradition has justified
itself . 8 Paradoxically, while hostility to big business and finance
has on occasion led to local authoritarianism and to unhealthy
modes of rebellion , 9 it has also been one of the resources upon
which American democracy has drawn. So, after all, even the
overblown rhetoric of the anti-trust movement finds its place,
and even the Progressive charade of anti-monopoly takes on a
function that goes beyond mere entertainment. No doubt the
immediate material achievement was quite small in proportion
to all the noise; but there are many episodes in history in which
intense struggle has to be waged to win modest gains, and this
too must be remembered before we pass too severe a judgment
on the great Progressive crusade against the trusts.

in. The Citizen and the Machine

If big business was the ultimate enemy of the Progressive, his
proximate enemy was the political machine. The problem of

8 Franz Neumann: Behemoth (New York, 1942), pp. 15-16.

9 Lipset and Bendrx: “Social Status and Social Structure,” passim .

255

Chajpter vi : The Struggle over Organization

political organization gave him somewhat the same sort of
perplexity as that of economic organization; it similarly divided
the Progressive community between those who proposed an
aggressive and uncompromising struggle against organization
as such and those who proposed to meet it by counterorganiza-
tion, by increasing specialism and leadership, and by the as-
sumption of new responsibilities. Unless the machine and its
leader, the boss, could be broken, unless the corrupt alliance
between special interests and the machine could be smashed,
it seemed that no lasting reform could be accomplished. Hence
this particular form of the struggle over organization was promi-
nent in political discussions from the beginning to the end of
the Progressive era. What the majority of the Progressives hoped
to do in the political field was to restore popular government as
they imagined it to have existed in an earlier and purer age.
This could be done, it was widely believed, only by revivifying
the morale of the citizen, and using his newly aroused zeal to
push through a series of changes in the mechanics of political
life — direct primaries, popular election of Senators, initiative,
referendum, recall, the short ballot, commission government,
and the like. Such measures, it was expected, would deprive
machine government of the advantages it had in checkmating
popular control, and make government accessible to the superior
disinterestedness and honesty of the average citizen. Then,
with the power of the bosses broken or crippled, it would be
possible to check the incursions of the interests upon the welfare
of the people and realize a cleaner, more' efficient government.

The Progressives set about the task of political reform with
great energy and resourcefulness. By 1910 they had had a con-
siderable measure of success in getting their reforms incorpo-
rated into the electoral and governmental machinery, and this
success engendered in some quarters a high optimism about the
future of the movement for popular government. William Allen
White’s book The Old Order Changeth , published in that year,
deserves analysis as a hearty expression of this optimism and as

256

THE AGE OF REFORM

a statement of what was probably the dominant popular phi-
losophy of politics. America, White believed, was in the midst
of an inexorable “drift” toward democracy, which had produced
gain after gain in the sphere of popular government — victories
for the secret ballot and the direct primary, the widespread
adoption of the recall of officials, the impending triumph of the
popular referendum. Such changes would not have been
dreamed of ten years before, “and to have told the campaign
managers of ’84 or ’88 that within a quarter of a century the
whole nation would be voting a secret ballot, the candidates
nominated in two-thirds of the American states by a direct vote
of the people, without the intervention of conventions or cau-
cuses, and that . . . every dollar spent by a candidate or by a
party committee would have to be publicly accounted for,”
would have aroused only a cackle of derision. Now in twenty-six
states of the Union, Senators had to go directly to the people for
their nomination, not to the railroads and utilities as before.
“Capital is not eliminated from politics, but it is hampered and
circumscribed, and is not the dominant force it was ten years
ago.” “It is safe to say that the decree of divorce between busi-
ness and politics will be absolute within a few years.” “Now the
political machine is in a fair way to be reduced to mere political
scrap iron by the rise of the people. . . . Under the primary
system any clean, quick-witted man in these states can defeat
the corporation senatorial candidate at the primary if the peo-
ple desire to defeat him.” 1

White fully shared the dominant Progressive philosophy con-
cerning organization. The business of reform in politics, he said,
had to be done by taking the power to nominate and elect candi-
dates and to set policies out of the hands of the old ruling caste
of the machines. Such a thing “could always be done by break-
ing the machine of the moment or of any locality and establish-
ing another machine ” But such a remedy was no good — and
here was the crux of the matter — because it was not “a perma-
1 White: The Old Order Changeth , pp. 34, 36, 39, 47-53.

257

Chapter vi: The Struggle over Organization

nent cure.” The only permanent cure was in changing the sys-
tem . 2 If theory was to be effective in practice, one would have
no machines at all. White did not hesitate to emphasize the un-
derlying individualism of the popular revolt: it was a change in
"the public's moral average," the aggregate result of the trans-
formation of a multitude of individual wills. Yet for all its need
to bring property under control, it was far from socialistic: "the
modern movement in American politics is bristling with ramp-
ant, militant, unhampered men crowding out of the mass for
individual elbow-room ." 3

None of this movement for elbow-room was considered to be
excessively self -regarding. White's book was full of references to
the intelligence, the self-restraint, the morality, the breadth of
view of the average man, the emergent New Citizen. The whole
process of revolt was indeed so benign that he could only attrib-
ute it to the workings of "a divinely planted instinct." For it was
essential that the individual be — as he was proving himself —
disinterested. The New Citizen was the guilty and neglectful
citizen of the muckraking literature after he had been reformed
and aroused by all the exhortatory literature of the age. "The
people are controlling themselves. Altruism is gaining strength
for some future struggle with the atomic force of egoism in
society ” 4 It followed from this view of the citizen that his con-
tribution to the public weal grew not out of his pursuit in
politics of his own needs but, in the manner of the old Mug-
wump ideal, out of his disinterested reflection upon the needs of
the community. Of course the struggle against the machines
could not take place without the benefit of some form of counter-
organization; but it was characteristic of this style of thought to
conceive of these counter-organizations as private organizations
based upon high principles rather than group interests — organi-
zations like the National Civil Service Reform League, the Pure

258

THE AGE OF REFORM

Food Association, the Child Labor Committee, the Consumers 3
League, the National Civic Federation, the Masons, and other
fraternal groups. What all such things rested upon for their suc-
cess was the civic virtue — White spoke rather of “righteousness”
and “altruism” — of the individual, his willingness not to pursue
his interests but to transcend them. “Democracy is, at base,
altruism expressed in terms of self-government.” “Practically all
the large national organizations which jam the trains annually
going to their conventions are fundamentally altruistic .” 5

We can see now in its broad outlines the persistent individ-
ualism of these Progressives. Although it was necessary for them
to make some use of organization, they had a profound inherited
distrust of it. At the core of their conception of politics was a
figure quite as old-fashioned as the figure of the little competi-
tive entrepreneur who represented the most commonly accepted
economic ideal. This old-fashioned character was the Man of
Good Will, the same innocent, bewildered, bespectacled, and
mustached figure we see in the cartoons today labeled John Q.
Public — a white collar or small business voter-taxpayer with
perhaps a modest home in the suburbs. William Graham Sum-
ner had depicted him a generation earlier as “the forgotten
man,” and Woodrow Wilson idealized him as “the man on the
make” whose type, coming “out of the unknown homes,” was the
hope of America. In a great deal of Progressive thinking the
Man of Good Will was abstracted from association with positive
interests; his chief interests were negative. He needed to be pro-
tected from unjust taxation, spared the high cost of living, re-
lieved of the exactions of the monopolies and the grafting of the
bosses. In years past he had been careless about his civic re-
sponsibilities, but now he was rising in righteous wrath and as-
serting himself. He was at last ready to address himself seriously
to the business of government. The problem was to devise such
governmental machinery as would empower him to rule. Since
he was dissociated from all special interests and biases and had

6 Ibid., pp. 132, 143; see chapter vi passim.

259

Chapter vi: The Struggle over Organization

nothing but the common weal at heart, he would rule well. He
would act and think as a public-spirited individual, unlike all
the groups of vested interests that were ready to prey on him.
Bad people had pressure groups; the Man of Good Will had
only his civic organizations. Far from joining organizations to
advance his own interests, he would dissociate himself from
such combinations and address himself directly and high-
mindedly to the problems of government. His approach to
politics was, in a sense, intellectualistic: he would study the
issues and think them through, rather than learn about them
through pursuing his needs. Furthermore, it was assumed that
somehow he would really be capable of informing himself in
ample detail about the many issues that he would have to pass
on, and that he could master their intricacies sufficiently to
pass intelligent judgment.

Without such assumptions the entire movement for such re-
forms as the initiative, the referendum, and recall is unintelligi-
ble. The movement for direct popular democracy was, in effect,
an attempt to realize Yankee-Protestant ideals of personal re-
sponsibility; and the Progressive notion of good citizenship was
the culmination of the Yankee- Mugwump ethos of political
participation without self-interest. But while this ethos un-
doubtedly has its distinct points of superiority to the boss-
machine ethos of hierarchy, discipline, personal loyalty, and per-
sonal favors, it was less adapted to the realities of the highly
organized society of the late nineteenth and the twentieth cen-
tury. It is not surprising, then, that so much of the political
machinery designed to implement the aims of direct democracy
should have been found of very limited use.

Of course, not all his Progressive contemporaries were quite
so optimistic as William Allen White. There were a number of
Progressive spokesmen who found fault with his assumptions,
and there were a few outstanding Progressive leaders who sur-
mounted them in their practical political dealings. Just as Pro-
gressive discussions of the business order were pervaded by an

260

THE AGE OF REFORM

argument between two schools with contrasting schemes for
dealing with the trusts, so the discussions of political reform
took place between two sides that were divided by a difference
in philosophy. On the left was a populistic school of thought
that seemed to have hardly any reservations about the extent to
which the management of affairs could and should be given
into the hands of the populace. This school, which can be
traced as far back as the time when Jackson argued for rotation
in office on the ground that “the duties of all public offices are,
or at least admit of being made, so plain and simple that men of
intelligence may readily qualify themselves for their perform-
ance, found its contempoiary expression in William Jennings
Bryan’s contention that the people were competent “to sit in
judgment on every question which has arisen or which will
arise, no matter how long our government will endure,” and his
argument that the great political questions were in the final
analysis moral questions concerning which the intuitions of the
people were as good as almost any degree of experience. Even
a man like Woodrow Wilson, whose native impulses and earlier
philosophy ran quite to the contrary, fell into this populistic
conception of democracy when he asserted that the Democratic
Party aimed “to set up a government in the world where the
average man, the plain man, the common man, the ignorant
man, the unaccomplished man, the poor man had a voice equal
to the voice of anybody else in the settlement of the common
affairs, an ideal never before realized in the history of the
world .” 6

This faith in the lowest common denominator of political ac-
tion was frequently coupled with an attack on political organiza-
tion. The political evils that plagued the country, it was often
argued, were not the consequences of deficient organization but
of over-organization. The answer to these evils was to move as
close as possible to a system of “direct government” by the peo-
ple. It was considered not only that the people were capable of

6 Link: Wilson: the Road to the White House , p. 518.

261

Chapter vi: The Struggle over Organization

acting effectively as individuals, but that they were at their best
when acting in this capacity because only then were they free of
the corrupting and self-interested influence of parties and ma-
chines. Thus Albert Baird Cummins, when he ran for the gov-
ernorship of Iowa in 1910, declared that his great object was “to
bring the individual voter into more prominence, and to dimm-
ish the influence of permanent organization in the ranks of the
party.” 7

Those who shared this style of thought tended to deny that
the parties should be the property of the party organizations —
that is, of the groups of persons who did the work of the party
and held offices under its name — and to insist that the parties
properly belonged to the voters at large. Indeed, the rhetoric of
American party politics had encouraged this notion, and it was
easy to conclude that in so far as the party was in fact not the
property of the voters, democracy was being flouted. Democracy
was considered to require not merely competition between party
organizations that would afford the voters a choice, but rank-
and-file control or dissolution of the organizations themselves.
The movement for the direct primary was the chief embodiment
of this conception of democracy. 8 Its historical inspiration pre-

7 Dictionary of American Biography , Vol. IV (New York, 1930), p. 597.
This point of view was expressed as late as 1923 by Senator George W.
Norris m a defense of the direct primary. “One of the [most important]
objections that is always made to the direct primary is that it takes away
party responsibility and breaks down party control . . . Politicians, politi-
cal bosses, corporations and combmations seeking special privilege and ex-
ceptional favor at the hands of legislatures and executive officials, always
urge this as the first reason why the direct primary should be abolished.
But this objection thus given against the direct primary I frankly offer as
one of the best reasons for its retention. The direct primary will lower
party responsibility. In its stead it establishes individual responsibility It
does lessen allegiance to party and mcrease individual independence, both
as to the public official and as to the private citizen. It takes away the
power of the party leader or boss and places the responsibility for control
upon the individual. It lessens party spirit and decreases partisanship.”
“Why I Believe m the Direct Primary,” Annals of the American Academy
of Political and Social Science, Vol CVI (March 1923), p. 23.

8 See E. E. Schattschneider: Party Government (New York, 1942), pp.
53-61.

262

THE AGE OF REFORM

sumably came from the town-meeting model, and from the
widespread direct participation of the American citizen in civic
affairs in the early and middle years of the nineteenth century.

Counterposed to this philosophy was a more conservative
view, expressed by a good many men who recognized the value
of the Progressive demands for reform and saw the importance
of popular discontent, but who looked to new forms of political
organization under responsible leadership as the most desirable
and effective remedy for the evils against which the Progressives
were working. The historical root of this point of view lay in the
long-standing Mugwump concern with good government and
in the implicit Mugwump belief in elite leadership. Brandeis,
as we have seen, expressed its impulse when he called upon the
lawyers to assume "a position of independence between the
wealthy and the people, prepared to curb the excesses of either,”
and so did T. R. when he entitled one of his talks to businessmen
"The Radical Movement under Conservative Direction ” 9
Henry L. Stimson, writing to Roosevelt in 1910, gave vent to a
somewhat partisan statement of this philosophy: "To me it
seems vitally important that the Republican party, which con-
tains, generally speaking, the richer and more intelligent citizens
of the country, should take the lead in reform and not drift into
a reactionary position. If, instead, the leadership should fall into
the hands of either an independent party, or a party composed,
like the Democrats, largely of foreign elements and the classes
which will immediately benefit by the reform, and if the solid
business Republicans should drift into new obstruction, I fear
the necessary changes could hardly be accomplished without
much excitement and possible violence.” 1

Somewhat more congenial to Mugwump traditions was the
idea that the evils against which the Progressives were fighting
could be remedied by a reorganization of government in which

9 Theodore Roosevelt: Works , National Edition (New York, 1926),
Vol. XVI, pp 86-99.

1 Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, op. cit, p. 22.

263

Chapter vi: The Struggle over Organization

responsibility and authority could be clearly located in an execu-
tive, whose acts would be open to public view. The power o£
the boss, they argued, like the overweening power of great
corporations, was a consequence of the weakness of the political
executive and the more general division of authority and im-
potence in government. Spokesmen of this view scoffed at the
inherited popular suspicion of executive power as an outmoded
holdover from the days of the early Republic when executive
power was still identified with royal government and the royal
governors. "The true remedy for American misgovernment,”
said Stimson, "would lie, then, in exactly the opposite direction
from that indicated by the advocates of direct democracy. The
elected officials must have more power, not less. . . ” 2 The pur-
pose of such devices would not be to flout public opinion, but to
give expression to its demands in conformity with principles of
organization that accepted the realities of a complex society.

The most ardent debate, however, did not take place between
the two schools of reformers, but between the direct-govern-
ment reformers and the ultraconservatives. To attend to the
terms in which the various reforms intended to promote direct
democracy were debated — and to these one should add the pro-
posal for women s suffrage — one might think that the issue was
utopia versus apocalypse. The conservatives moaned and ad-
monished as though each new reform proposal portended the
end of the nation, while many Progressives seemed to imagine
and often, indeed, said that these reforms, once achieved, would
open the way to a complete and permanent victory over the
machines and corruption. Woodrow Wilson, for instance, once
said of the short ballot that it was "the key to the whole problem
of the restoration of popular government in this country” 3 —
which was a heavy burden, sound reform though it was, for the

2 Ibid., p. 58, see the general argument of chapter iii, “Responsible
Government,” pp. 56-81.

3 Quoted in Austin F. Macdonald: American City Government and Ad-
ministration, 3rd ed. (New York, 1941), p. 279. Cf. Walter Lippmann in
1914: “I have just read a book by a college professor which announces

264

THE AGE OF REFORM

short ballot to bear. There were of course more moderate men
on both sides , 4 and in retrospect it is clearly these men who were
right; for the popular reforms neither revolutionized nor re-
stored anything; they had, indeed, only a marginal effect on the
conduct of American government.

Here the more general Progressive uprising against bossism,
corruption, and misgovernment must be distinguished from the
attempt to realize mechanical changes that would guarantee
permanent popular rule. Where the reform movements suc-
ceeded as they did in sufficient measure to bring a distinct im-
provement in American government, it was largely because they
came in on a strong wave of popular enthusiasm or indignation
or under the guidance of local leaders of exceptional magnetism.
Such leaders and such public sentiments, I believe, would have
had somewhat the same results within the framework of the
older mechanism of government. In their search for mechanical
guarantees of continued popular control the reformers were try-
ing to do something altogether impossible — to institutionalize a
mood. When the mood passed, some of the more concrete re-
forms remained; but the formal gains for popular government,
while still on the books, lost meaning because the ability of the
public to use them effectively lapsed with the political revival
that brought them in, and the bosses and the interests promptly
filtered back. Herbert Croly, while by no means unsympathetic
to the “professional democrats,” as he called them, argued
cogently that their tendency “to conceive democracy as essen-
tially a matter of popular political machinery” was one of their
great weaknesses. Their dominant impulse was to protect the
people against knavery, a negative goal, rather than “to give

that the short ballot will be as deep a revolution as the abolition of slavery.
There are innumerable Americans who beheve that a democratic constitu-
tion would create a democracy.” Drift and Mastery , p. 187. Cf. La Fol-
lette’s hopes for the direct primary, Autobiography , pp. 197-8.

4 An excellent contemporary discussion of the whole problem of the
pubhc will and representative institutions was A. Lawrence Lowell’s Public
Opinion and Popular Government (New York, 1913), see also the critical
reflections of Herbert Croly in Progressive Democracy (New York, 1914).

265

Chapter vi: The Struggle over Organization

positive momentum and direction to popular rule.” They sought,
above all, "to prevent the people from being betrayed — from
being imposed upon by unpopular policies and unrepresentative
officials. But to indoctrinate and organize one’s life chiefly for
the purpose of avoiding betrayal is to invite sterility and disinte-
gration.” He concluded that the impulse toward popular rule
was without meaning whenever it was divorced from a specific
social program . 6

The history of Progressive reform justified Croly’s argument,
for under the impact of the Progressive movement the people
in many places won better public services, better parks, better
schools, better tax policies, but they did not destroy narrowly
partisan government, break up machines, or gain direct control
of their affairs. With a few exceptions, the bosses found ways
either to deflect or to use the new reforms that were meant to
unseat them . 6 The direct primary, for instance, for all its wide
adoption throughout the country, did not noticeably change the
type of men nominated for office. It was expensive both to the
government and to the candidates — for it introduced two cam-
paigns in the place of one. It put a new premium on publicity
and promotion in nominating campaigns, and thus introduced
into the political process another entering wedge for the power
of money. Without seriously impairing the machines, it weak-
ened party government and party responsibility. The initiative
and referendum were also disappointing as instruments of popu-
lar government. As critics like Herbert Croly pointed out, they

6 Croly: Progressive Democracy , pp. 213-14; see in general chapters
x and xiii.

6 Where the tone of a community was congenial to bossism it was im-
possible to find political mechanics that would prevent it. One of the signal
illustrations of this comes from New Jersey, where the Walsh Act of 1911
permitted municipalities to change to the commission system of govern-
ment. This was one of the reforms that worked to good effect m some
places, but m New Jersey Frank Hague used his position as commissioner
of public safety — i.e., the police and fire departments — as a stepping-stone
toward that execrable regime for which he became notorious. Dayton D.
McKean: The Boss: the Hague Machine in Action (Boston, 1940), pp.
37 — 45.

266

THE AGE OF REFORM

were perfectly designed to facilitate minority rule in so far as
the complex questions set before the voters in referendums
could be passed with a distinct minority of the total registra-
tion . 7 Confronted by an array of technical questions, often
phrased in legal language, the voters shrank from the responsi-
bilities the new system attempted to put upon them. Small and
highly organized groups with plenty of funds and skillful pub-
licity could make use of these devices, but such were not the
results the proponents of initiative and referendum sought; nor
was the additional derationalization of politics that came with
the propaganda campaigns demanded by referendums. Finally,
the more ardent reformers who expected that the public will,
once expressed directly, would bring a radical transformation of
the old order were surprised to find the voters exercising their
prerogative in the most conservative way, rejecting, for instance,
proposals for municipal ownership, the single tax, and pensions
for city employees . 8

The reformers were, of course, entirely right in feeling that
effective action against the old political machines and their
bosses was both possible and desirable. Reform has been the
balance wheel of the governmental system. The existing ma-

7 Herbert Croly: Progressive Democracy , p. 306.

s There is an extensive literature on such practices as direct primaries,
the short ballot, initiative, referendum, recall, commission government,
the city-manager plan, and other reforms of the age. For a brief general
critique see William B. Munro: The Government of American Cities ,
4th ed. (New York, 1933).

Some sober party estimates of the direct primary may be found in
Armais of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, Vol. CVI
( March 1933 ) . The comments of working politicians on the direct primary
in Ralph S. Boots: The Direct Primary in New Jersey (New York, 1917),
pp. 262-76, are of unusual interest.

One of the more successful changes, useful chiefly in smaller munici-
palities, was the city-manager plan, which paid more deference to the
need for concentration of power and expertise than the devices aimed to
bring about direct popular government. The value even of this plan, how-
ever, has been impaired by the unwillingness of American voters to see
their city managers ( or their other administrators or political leaders ) paid
adequate salaries. On this see Thomas H. Reed. Municipal Government in
the United States ( New York, 1934 ) , chapter xiv.

267

Chapter vi: The Struggle over Organization

chines did their work at unnecessary cost and with gross in-
equities, and their humane care of their own constituents was
matched by the outright brutality and the crass disregard of
civil hberties with which they frequently dealt with opposition.
Unopposed by the reform principle, the machine principle
tended to deteriorate to the point at which good government
and liberal politics both were threatened. But the characteristic
mistake of the more dogmatic enthusiasts for direct government
was their unwillingness to consider the possibility of a synthesis
between the two principles, their faith in contrivances that
would somehow do away with the machine process and even
with party responsibility. Too many of these enthusiasts failed
to see that the machine organizations they were trying to de-
stroy did have a number of real functions, however badly they
often performed them, and that any attempt to replace the
existing machines had to provide not William Allen White’s
"permanent cure” for the whole machine system, but rather
alternative machines. There are machines and machines. The
real choice that lay before the reformers was not whether to
have direct popular government or party organizations and
machines, but whether, in destroying the existing organizations,
they could create organizations of their own, with discipline
enough to survive, that would be cleaner and more efficient than
those they were trying to break up. It must be admitted at once
that in this respect the practice of some skilled Progressive lead-
ers was often superior to their theories and their rhetoric.
La Follette was an excellent case in point. Although he ex-
pressed great faith in the efficacy of the direct-government re-
forms, he remained in power for a long time and exerted a
strong and salutary influence on Wisconsin life because he was
an extremely astute machine-master, who knew the techniques
of the bosses and used some of them to build a militant and
well-disciplined state organization . 9

9 The whole subject of the types of political machines and the character
of what might be called reform machines needs study by historians and

268

THE AGE OF REFORM

It is in our own times that the most notable decline in the
strength and importance of the old-fashioned machines has
taken place. This has occurred not because the machines have
yielded to frontal assault but because some of their former func-
tions have ceased to be necessary and others have been taken
over by new agencies. There is no longer the great mass of im-
migrants to be patronized and introduced to American life. Fed-
eral centralization, especially since the New Deal, has nibbled
away at the role of the local organizations, particularly in the
sphere of social welfare. The growth of the mass trade unions
has displaced the machines in some respects, while the develop-
ment of stronger executives in state and local government has
deprived them of some of their former patronage and power.
Much of the work of political indoctrination and education that
once belonged to them has been assumed by the mass media —
radio, television, and the mass periodicals, while the work of
sounding public sentiment has been taken over in some part by
professional pollsters. These latter developments suggest that we
are in a certain sense moving closer to the plebiscitarian ideals,
the mass democracy, that the advocates of direct government
had in mind. But they would not have been pleased with the
prospect of having their goals approached in this way, for the
means of influencing mass sentiment on a grand scale require the
big money and the crass manipulative techniques that the Pro-
gressives were trying to eliminate from politics. This brings us
back again to a central problem of the modem democrat:
whether it is possible in modern society to find satisfactory ways

political scientists. See, however, the suggestive article by Robert S. Max-
well: “La Follette and the Progressive Machine in Wisconsin,” Indiana
Magazine of History , Vol. XL VIII (March 1952), pp. 55-70, in which the
author briefly analyzes the La Follette machine as a particular instance
of the general proposition: “On those rare occasions when successful re-
form organizations have been welded together they have developed tech-
niques of political astuteness, leadership, and discipline not unlike the
traditional machines.” Cf. George Mowry’s remarks on Hiram Johnsons
California machine: The California Progressives, pp. 138-9, 292. The ad-
ministration of Fiorello La Guardia m New York affords a municipal ex-
ample of a reform movement that used machine methods.

269

Chajpter vi: The Struggle over Organization

of realizing the ideal of popular government without becoming
dependent to an unhealthy degree upon those who have the
means to influence the popular mind. Without taking an exces-
sively indulgent view of the old machines or imagining that
their failings were any less serious than they actually were, it is
still possible to wonder whether the devices that are replacing
them are superior as instruments of government.

((( 270 )))

CHAPTER VII

FROM PROGRESSIVISM TO THE NEW DEAL

i. Progressivism and War

v v ar has always been the Nemesis of the liberal tradition in
America. From our earliest history as a nation there has been a
curiously persistent association between democratic politics and
nationalism, jingoism, or war. Periodically war has written the
last scene to some drama begun by the popular side of the party
struggle. In the age of Jefferson and Madison it was the Jeffer-
sonian Republican Party, and particularly that faction of the
Republican Party associated with the democratic hinterland and
the frontier, that did most to bring on the War of 1812, and it
was the war that finally liquidated the Jeffersonian policies and
caused their reversal. Jacksonian democracy, the next popular
upsurge, was at first built upon nationalist hero-worship and the
military reputation of a leader whose ideas about domestic
policies were unknown. Although it fell short of actual war with
a European power, the diplomacy of Jacksonian democracy was
pugnacious. After their primary domestic reforms were accom-
plished, Jacksonian leaders prodded the nation toward bellicose
expansionism, risked war with England, and finally did go to
war with Mexico. In the subsequent "young America” move-
ment of the 1850’s, democracy and nationalism were again
marching hand in hand. After the long period of continental
settlement that followed the Civil War, a period of predomi-
nantly peaceful relations with foreign countries, it fell for the
first time in 1898 to the more conservative forces to be at the

271

Chapter vii: From Progressivism to the New Deal

helm in a time of war — but, as I pointed out in dealing with the
Populists, it was the more radical and popular and dissenting
forces in American life that felt the strongest impulse toward the
Cuban crusade, and it was the Mark Hanna, Wall Street kind
of Republican that showed the strongest initial opposition to the
war. Again, as after Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democracy, the
war, soon followed by prosperity, was a strong if only temporary
solvent of the reform impulse.

By the turn of the century, it is possible to distinguish two
chief strains of feeling in the Populist-Progressive tradition. The
first, more Populist than Progressive, more rural and sectional
than nationwide in its appeal, represents, in a sense, the roots of
modern American isolationism. But this Populist impulse was
less pacifistic and isolationist than it was nationalist, anti-Euro-
pean, and anti-English. Although it was by no means devoid of
belligerent potential, it was opposed to imperialism or colonial-
ism or militarism. To the good Populist, imperialism was doubly
accursed — appeal though it might to his national pride — be-
cause it was held to benefit the capitalist and the Wall Streeter
rather than the nation at large, and because it was too strongly
imitative of the British example. To the Populist who was also a
Southerner, imperialism was further questionable because it
brought new alien races into the national fold. Hence a great
many Americans who had responded with enthusiasm to the
war against Spain as a crusade to liberate underdogs in Cuba
and to strike at a decadent European aristocratic and Catholic
power became as ardently anti-imperialist as they had been pro-
war, just as soon as they saw some capitalists express an interest
in the Philippines as an imperial outpost.

When all this has been said, it must be added that alongside
this nationalist belligerence and crusading credulity of the na-
tive American, there was a genuine streak of Christian pacifism,
too inconsistently held to be an overruling force and yet far
from a negligible influence in the conduct of national affairs. It
was this pacifism that Bryan at times appealed to and that Wil-

272

THE AGE OF REFORM

son in good part relied on during the period when he was “too
proud to fight.” Both men drew on the same strain o£ moral
idealism in their conduct of what Arthur S. Link has called
“missionary diplomacy,” in relation to China, Mexico, and the
Caribbean countries . 1

The second source of patriotic and imperialist sentiment was
neither among the Populists nor the ultraconservatives of the
country, but among the fervently patriotic and nationalistic
middle-class Americans in all parts of the country who were
deeply attracted to Republican insurgency. It is true that there
were among the Republican Progressives a few ardent pacifists
like Jane Addams as well as a small group of isolationists who
followed men like the elder La Follette and George W. Norris
in their courageous last-ditch resistance to American participa-
tion in the first World War. But the main stream of feeling in the
ranks of insurgency was neither anti-war nor anti-imperialist.
Its real spiritual leader, in this as in other respects, was T. R.,
with his militarist preachments and his hearty appeals to unself-
ish patriotism and manliness against self-seeking and materialis-
tic motives. As William Leuchtenburg has shown, the Progres-
sives, with few exceptions on scattered issues, either supported
the imperialist policies of the era or quietly acquiesced in them.
The majority of them voted for increased naval expenditures,
leaving to conservatives the task of leading the opposition to
big-navy measures. They took no issue with “Dollar Diplomacy,”
or with Tafts policy when he landed marines in Nicaragua.
Most of them supported T. R. in his adventures in Panama and
the Far East, and his naval expansion. They fought and voted
for policies underwriting American hegemony in the Caribbean,
followed Roosevelt in his contemptuous ( and not altogether un-

1 For an excellent assessment of the merits and defects of missionary
diplomacy, see Arthur S. Link* Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era
(New York, 1954), chapters iv, v. In the following account I have bene-
fited from the detailed analysis of the rhetoric of our foreign policy in
Robert Endicott Osgood: Ideals and Self-Interest in America’s Foreign
Relations (Chicago, 1953). See also George F. Kennan: American Diplo-
macy , 1900-1950 (Chicago, 1951), chapter iv.

273

Chapter vh: From Progressivism to the New Deal

justified) criticisms of Taft’s arbitration treaties, opposed Wil-
son’s magnanimous bill to repeal the Panama Canal tolls. By
1914 the Progressive Party, which owed its origins in no small
degree to insurgency over the tariff issue, came out for a higher
protective tariff, and by 1916 it was entirely committed to the
defense of “national honor,” excoriation of Wilson, prepared-
ness, and Americanism. By 1916 “imperialism and militarism
had replaced the old liberal formulas of protest, and within a
year the party was dead.” 2 3

Participation in the war put an end to the Progressive move-
ment. And yet the wartime frenzy of idealism and self-sacrifice
marked the apotheosis as well as the liquidation of the Progres-
sive spirit. It would be misleading to imply that American en-
trance into the war was in any special sense the work of the Pro-
gressives, for the final movement toward war was a nationwide
movement, shared by the majority of Americans in both major
parties. What is significant, however, is that the war was justi-
fied before the American public — perhaps had to be justified —
in the Progressive rhetoric and on Progressive terms; and that
the men who went to work for George Creel (himself a crusad-
ing journalist) in the Committee on Public Information, whose
job it was to stimulate public enthusiasm for the war, were in
so many instances the same men who had learned their trade
drumming up enthusiasm for the Progressive reforms and pro-
viding articles for the muckraking magazines. By 1912 the Pro-
gressive spirit had become so pervasive that any policy —
whether it was entrance into the war as rationalized by Wilson
or abstention from the war as rationalized by La Follette — could
be strengthened if a way could be found to put it in Progres-

2 William E. Leuchtenburg: “Progressivism and Imperialism: the Pro-

gressive Movement and American Foreign Policy, 1898-1916,” Mississippi
Valley Historical Review , Vol. XXXIX (December 1952), p. 496. Leuch-
tenburg points out that the Progressives felt that their idealism and anti-
materialism in domestic policies were not contradicted but m fact comple-
mented by their militancy m foreign policy and their strong faith in the
mission of America.

274

THE AGE OF REFORM

sive language. In the end, when the inevitable reaction came,
the Progressive language itself seemed to have been discredited.

In the course of the long struggle over neutrality Wilson is the
key figure, not merely because of the central power of leader-
ship he exercised but because he was, on this issue, a representa-
tive American and a good Progressive citizen who expressed in
every inconsistency, every vacillation, every reluctance, the pre-
dominant feelings of the country. He embodied, too, the tri-
umph of the Progressive need to phrase the problems of national
policy in moral terms . 3 At first, while sharing the common reluc-
tance to become involved in the struggle, he eschewed the “real-
istic” formula that the whole struggle was none of America’s
business and that the essence of the American problem was to
stay out at all costs. Even his plea for neutrality was pitched in
high moral terms: the nation must stay out in order to be of
service, to provide a center of sanity uncorrupted by the strains
and hatreds of belligerence. It must — the phrase was so charac-
teristic — maintain “absolute self-mastery” and keep aloof in or-
der that it might in the end bring a “disinterested influence” to
the settlement.

Then, as the country drew closer to involvement under the
pressure of events, Wilson again chose the language of idealism

3 Although T. R. prided himself on his “realism,” I do not think the
case was much different with him. He too was a moralist, except that
where Wilson invoked pacifistic moral considerations, T. R. was constantly
crying for the hairy-chested Darwinian virtues, attacking “cowardice,”
“ease and soft living,” “the pleasures of material well-being,” and the
like, and dealing with international relations in terms of the “timidity”
of a man whose wife has been slapped and who will not fight, and similar
juvenile comparisons. “The just war,” he once wrote, “is a war for the
integrity of high ideals The only safe motto for the individual citizen
of a democracy fit to play a great part m the world is service — service
by work and help in peace, service through the high gallantry of entire
indifference to life, if war comes on the land.” Osgood, op. cit., p. 140.
Osgood concludes (ibid., p. 143) that “for more than two years before
the United States entered the war Roosevelt’s appeals to the American
people were couched in terms of saving civilization and the national honor
rather than the Umted States itself. . . . His influence . . . was not,
after 1914, directed toward arousing a realistic appraisal of the imperatives
of self-preservation.”

275

Chapter vh: From Progressivism to the New Deal

to formulate the American problem — the problem not only
whether the United States should intervene, but what might be
the valid reasons for intervening. One view — a view widely
shared within the Wilson administration and among thoughtful
men in the country at large — rested chiefly upon the national
interest and cool calculations of the future advantage of the
United States. According to this view, a victory for imperial Ger-
many would represent a threat to the long-term interests of the
United States in some sense that a victory for the Allies would
not. It was expected that a victorious Germany would be more
aggressive, more formidable, more anti-American, and that after
the defeat of the Allies and the surrender of the British fleet it
would either turn upon the United States at some future time or
at least present so forceful and continuous a threat as to com-
pel this country to remain a perpetual armed camp in order to
protect its security. Therefore, it was argued, it was the business
of the United States, as a matter of self-interest, to see to it that
the Allies were not defeated — acting if possible as a nonbel-
ligerent, but if necessary as a belligerent. Another view was that
intervention in the war could not properly be expressed in such
calculating and self-regarding terms, but must rest upon moral
and ideological considerations — the defense of international law
and freedom of the seas, the rights of small nations, the fight
against autocracy and militarism, the struggle to make the world
safe for democracy . 4 To be sure, the argument from self-preser-

4 This is not to say that the conception of a German invasion of the
United States played no part in pre-intervention discussions of the sub-
ject. Fantasies about such an invasion were common m the press. ( Osgood,
ibid., pp. 132-3.) In its issues from May 1915 to February 1916, Mc-
Clures ran two series of articles about an imaginary German invasion of
the United States m 1921, under the titles “The Conquest of America,”
and “Saving the Nation ” In the end, after the assassination of the Presi-
dent, Theodore Roosevelt, Herman Ridder the German- American, William
Jennings Bryan, and Charles Edward Russell the Socialist, all join hands
to lead the American people m a spiritual awakening. Much of the dis-
cussion of preparedness in this period was m the Rooseveltian vein.
Cf. Porter Emerson Browne, “We’ll Dally ’round the Flag, Boys!” Mc-
Clures , Vol. XLIX (October 1916), p. 81: “Here we are, the richest na-

276

THE AGE OF REFORM

vation and national interest and the argument from morals and
ideals were not mutually contradictory, and both tended to have
a place in the course of public discussion. But Wilson’s course,
the characteristically Progressive course, was to minimize and
subordinate the self-regarding considerations, and to place
American intervention upon the loftiest possible plane. He com-
mitted himself to this line of action quite early in the game
when he rested so much of his diplomacy on the issue of the
conduct of German submarine warfare and the freedom of the
seas. This was quixotically formulated because it linked the
problem of American intervention or non-intervention to an
issue of international law — though one entirely congenial to
the Progressive concern over lawlessness. To Wilson’s critics
it seemed hypocritical because in purely formal terms British
violations of maritime law were about as serious as German vio-
lations. American concern over them could never be pressed so
vigorously because such a course of action would trip over the
more urgent desire to do nothing to impair the chances of Allied
victory.

Our experience after the second World War suggests that in
the long run there was nothing Wilson could have done to pre-
vent a reaction against both the war itself and the Progressive
movement that preceded the war. But this too seems almost cer-
tain: that by pinning America’s role in the war so exclusively to
high moral considerations and to altruism and self-sacrifice, by
linking the foreign crusade as intimately as possible to the Pro-
gressive values and the Progressive language, he was uninten-
tionally insuring that the reaction against Progressivism and
moral idealism would be as intense as it could be. For he was
telling the American people, in effect, not that they were de-
fending themselves, but that as citizens of the world they were
undertaking the same broad responsibilities for world order and

tion in the world, and the most supine and the fattest, both in body and
in head. Wallowing m physical luxury, we have become spiritually so
loose, so lax and so lazy that we have almost lost the capacity to act.”

277

Chapter vn: From Progressivism to the New Deal

world democracy that they had been expected, under the Yan-
kee ethos of responsibility, to assume for their own institutions . 5
The crusade for reform and for democratic institutions, difficult
as it was at home, was now to be projected to the world scene . 6

Wilson turned his back on the realistic considerations that
might be offered as reasons for intervention, and continually
stressed the more grandiose idealistic reasons. He did more than
ignore the self -regarding considerations: on occasion he repudi-
ated them. "There is not a single selfish element, so far as I can
see, in the cause we are fighting for,” he told the people shortly
after American entry. "We are fighting for what we believe and
wish to be the rights of mankind and for the future peace and
security of the world .” 7 Again: "We have gone in with no spe-
cial grievance of our own, because we have always said that we
were the friends and servants of mankind. We look for no profit.
We look for no advantage ” 8 9 "America,” he said, all too truth-
fully, during the debate over the treaty, . . is the only ideal-
istic Nation in the world.” 3

5 Daniel J. Boorstin has pointed out that while Americans had pre-
viously hoped on occasion to encourage the growth of representative in-
stitutions abroad, as m the period after the revolutions of 1848, it was not
until the time of Wilson that there was in this country any serious expecta-
tion that this could be done, much less that Americans could be con-
sidered to have any responsibility to see to it. The prevailing notion had
been, rather, that American institutions were distinctive and that Europe
was incapable of adopting them. It was Wilson who first urged Americans
to be “citizens of the world’' and insisted that their principles were “not
the principles of a province or of a single continent . . . [but] the prin-
ciples of a hberated mankind” “L’Europe mie par VAmerique du Nord”
in Pierre Renouvm et ah, eds.: VEurope du XIXe et du XXe siecles:
problimes et interpretations historiques (Milan, 1955).

6 And quite literally too. Cf. Bryan as late as 1923: “Our Nation will
be saloonless for evermore and will lead the world in the great crusade
which will drive intoxicating liquor from the globe.” “Prohibition,” Out-
look , Vol. CXXXIII (February 7, 1923), p 265.

7 The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson (New York, 1925-7), Vol. V,

p. 22.

8 Ibid., p 33.

9 Ibid., Vol. VI, p. 52. It is worth noting, by way of contrast, that

F. D. R. suggested that the second World War be designated simply the
War for Survival. * J

278

THE AGE OF REFORM

What takes the sting of chauvinism out of this extraordinary
assertion is that Wilson justified it by going to the peace con-
ference without a single distinctively nationalist demand to
make, without a single claim for territory, indemnities, or spoils,
with no more self-regarding national object than to restrain his
allies, make a durable and just peace, and form a League that
would secure such a peace for an incalculable future. It was an
amazing episode in the history of diplomacy, an episode that
repeated with ironic variations the themes of American domestic
Progressivism: for here was Wilson, the innocent in the presence
of the interests, the reformer among such case-hardened “bosses”
of Europe as Lloyd George and Clemenceau, the spokesman of
the small man, the voiceless and unrepresented masses, flinging
his well-meaning program for the reform of the world into the
teeth of a tradition of calculating diplomacy and an ageless his-
tory of division and cynicism and strife. But it was not merely
upon Europe that Wilson was making impossible demands: he
had pushed the idealism and the resolution of his own people —
and even, among his own people, of those who were closest to
him — beyond the breaking-point. The vein of idealism he was
trying to mine was there; but the demands he made upon it as-
sumed that it would be inexhaustible, and his effort to give to
the idealism of America an internationalist form reckoned with-
out the fact that his country was not, even in the remotest sense,
a country with an internationalist outlook. The traditional
American idea had been not that the United States was to lead,
rescue, or redeem Europe, but that it was to take its own peo-
ple in a totally different direction which Europe was presumably
incapable of following. The United States was to be a kind of
non-Europe or anti-Europe . 1 Where European institutions were
old, static, decadent, and aristocratic, American institutions
were to be modern, progressive, moral, and democratic. This
undercurrent of feeling was as strong in the native American as
the uplifting passions of Progressivism, and far stronger than the

1 Cf. Boorstm, op. cit., passim .

279

Chapter vn: From Frogressivism to the New Deal

ephemeral passions of the war period. For a moment the West-
ern Allies might be thought of as exempt from these charges,
but before long they would again be considered, as England for
instance so characteristically was in the populistic mind, as the
embodiment of them. 2

It was remarkable that Wilson should have succeeded even
for a moment in uniting behind him as large a part of the coun-
try as he did in an enterprise founded upon the notion of Ameri-
can responsibility for the world. But it is in no way surprising
that he should have been resoundingly repudiated in the elec-
tion of 1920 — more resoundingly than any administration before
or since. Not long after they began to pay the price of war, the
people began to feel that they had been gulled by its promoters
both among the Allies and in the United States. In this respect
the historical revisionists of the postwar period were merely
tardy in catching up with them. The war purged the pent-up
guilts, shattered the ethos of responsibility that had permeated
the rhetoric of more than a decade. It convinced the people that
they had paid the price for such comforts of modern life as they
could claim, that they had finally answered to the full the Pro-
gressive demand for sacrifice and self-control and altruism. In
repudiating Wilson, the treaty, the League, and the war itself,
they repudiated the Progressive rhetoric and the Progressive
mood — for it was Wilson himself and his propagandists who had
done so much to tie all these together. Wilson had foreseen that
the waging of war would require turning the management of
affairs over to the interests the Progressives had been fighting —
but this was hardly the change that he had imagined it to be,
for only on limited issues and in superficial respects had the
management of affairs ever been very far out of those hands.

2 Note La Follette’s objection to Wilson's argument that it was im-
possible for democratic America to remam friendly with Prussian autoc-
racy: “But the President proposes alliance with Great Britain which . . .
is a hereditary monarchy . . . with a . . . House of Lords, with a heredi-
tary landed system, with a limited . . . suffrage for one class.” Con -
gressional Record , 65th Congress, 1st Sess , p. 228.

280

THE AGE OF REFORM

The reaction went farther than this: it destroyed the popular
impulse that had sustained Progressive politics for well over a
decade before 1914. The pressure for civic participation was
followed by widespread apathy, the sense of responsibility by
neglect, the call for sacrifice by hedonism. And with all this
there came, for a time, a sense of self-disgust. By 1920, publish-
ers were warning authors not to send them manuscripts about
the war — people would not hear of it. 8 When at last they were
willing to think about it at all, they thought of it as a mistake,
and they were ready to read books about the folly of war.

n. Entracte

Progressivism had been founded on a mood, and with the re-
action that followed the war that mood was dissipated. Many
months before Wilson and his party were repudiated in the elec-
tion of 1920 the reaction had begun under Wilson s own admin-
istration. For it was his Attorney General who did more than
any other man to make the postwar Red scare official. Wilson
himself, in refusing a pardon to Eugene Debs for opposition to
the war (a pardon that was eventually granted by Harding),
merely expressed the political absolutism of a style of thought
whose exponents intended to wipe out every vestige of sympa-
thy with Bolshevism, just as their fellows had been planning
to wipe out all political corruption and then to put a final end
to the consumption of alcohol. Moods are intangible, and yet
the change in America hung on mood as much as anything else.
It will not do to say, as it has often been said, that the returning
conservatism of the 1920’s can be attributed simply to the return
of prosperity, though it is doubtless true that this age of con-
servatism would have been shorter if the prosperity itself had
not lasted until 1929. The reaction, in fact, was at its most in-
tense pitch right after the war and during the brief postwar de-
3 Literary Digest, Vol. LXVI (August 21, 1920), p. 35.

281

Chapter vh: From Progressivism to the New Deal

pression. But still more important, the whole Progressive mood
from 1900 to 1914 had been a response, we must remember, not
to depression but to prosperity and economic well-being.

Naturally it was impossible that a mood so completely domi-
nant in, say, 1912 should have evaporated without any trace ten
years later. Yet what stands out is the extent to which Progres-
sivism had either disappeared or transmuted its form. The in-
dependent La Follette campaign of 1924 is commonly cited as
evidence that Progressivism was not dead during the twenties.
Certainly La Follette’s platform of 1924, calling for a number of
bold and unmistakably Progressive proposals — public owner-
ship of water power, eventual public ownership of railroads,
recognition of collective bargaining, greater governmental aid
to farmers, a child-labor law, and several mechanical reforms
aimed to expand popular democracy — went somewhat farther
than the characteristic pre-war Progressivism; and La Follette,
without substantial funds or machine support outside his home
state, did well to poll 16.6 per cent of the popular vote. But
twelve years earlier, when T. R. snatched the banner of Republi-
can insurgency from La Follette, Progressive sentiment had
been so general in the country that Taft, the only avowed con-
servative in the field, could not, even with the aid of several
state machines and ample funds, muster so much as one fourth
of the total vote. It is the disappearance of this Progressive con-
sensus of 1912 that seems most significant. Moreover, the
La Follette vote, often considered as measuring the minimum of
Progressive sentiment in the country, was doubtless much
stronger than Progressive sentiment itself: much of his support
was an ethnic vote based upon his reputation as an opponent of
the war; much of it, also, came from disgruntled farmers who
resented their exclusion from the general prosperity but who
would not have supported the broad program of social-demo-
cratic reform promised in La Follette’s platform. 4 Four years

4 An analysis of La Follette’s vote suggests two considerations o£ pri-
mary importance: first, its sharp sectional character, and second, the extent

282 THE AGE OF REFORM

later most of La Follette’s supporters seem to have voted for
Hoover.

There was, throughout the twenties, a continuous sputtering
of insurgency in the Senate, set off primarily by the agri-
cultural depression and the refusal of the Republican Presidents
to support strong measures of farm relief. Now and then the old
Populist rhetoric could be heard on Capitol Hill, but it came
chiefly from Western leaders who could be relied on not to bolt
in the presidential elections, and who indeed, as Hiram Johnson

to which it drew upon elements not distinctly or consistently Progressive.

La Follette carried only his own state, Wisconsin. While he ran well in
a number of industrial counties, he carried only one county east of the
Mississippi River, that in southern Illinois. He ran second to Coohdge in
eleven states, almost all of them in the spring wheat, ranching, mining, or
lumbering country of the North Central states and the Northwest: Minne-
sota, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho,
Washington, Oregon, and California. Six of these had been carried by
Bryan in 1896.

While m most states where he ran second La Follette seems to have
cut chiefly into Republican support, on the West Coast he got much sup-
port from dissident Democrats who had hoped for a liberal nominee and
were disappointed with Davis. See Kenneth C. MacKay: The Progressive
Movement of 1924 (New York, 1947), p. 223. Roy Peel and Thomas Don-
nelly point out that most of the La Follette counties went for Hoover m
1928. “Smith carried only 43 of the 409 La Follette counties. The Progres-
sives of 1924 were only Republicans in disguise.” The 1928 Campaign:
an Analysis (New York, 1931), p. 122.

In terms of class, La Follette seems to have appealed chiefly to farmers
suffering from agricultural depression and to the railroad workers, who
had been victimized by an extremely sweeping injunction obtained by
Harding’s Attorney General, Harry Daugherty, in a major strike in 1922.
MacKay, op. cit., pp. 27-33.

A very large portion of the La Follette vote appears to have been an
anti-war, anti-British, pro-German vote, chiefly among Germans but in
some part among Irish- Americans., MacKay (op. cit., pp. 216-17) doubts
that this was very significant, but for reasons which seem insubstantial.
Samuel Lubell, m a closer study of voting patterns, points to La Follette’s
strength m isolationist German-American counties that had not been Pro-
gressive-Bull Moose in 1912 and in counties that turned strongly against
Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940, after foreign relations became an important
issue. Lubell concludes: “The 4,800,000 votes which La Follette got in
1924 were often described loosely as the irreducible minimum of liberal
strength m America. Much of that vote, representing approval of La Fol-
lette’s opposition to war with Germany, actually had nothing to do with
liberalism-” The Future of American Politics (New York, 1952), p. 140.

283

Chapter vii: From Progressivism to the New Deal

saw when he referred to Senator William E. Borah as "our
spearless leader,” could usually be expected to do nothing dras-
tic. Congressmen from farm states, expressing the “hard” side of
agrarian thinking, formed the Farm Bloc to advance agrarian
interests. But the Congressional Progressives of the twenties,
except for the activities of a rare soul like George W. Norris and
the exposure of the Teapot Dome scandal, were on the whole a
fake, and many contemporaries knew it. 5

Under the cover of public indifference, and even with a large
measure of public applause, an old-style conservative leader-
ship, of a sort that the country had almost forgotten in the years
since 1900, came back into power, unchecked by any serious op-
position. While here and there, notably in New York, where
Alfred E. Smith’s administrations continued to extend social
legislation, the reforms of Progressivism still had some modicum
of meaning, in the nation at large it was a simple matter to re-
verse the Progressive policies. The Republican administrations
of the twenties raised the tariff to unheard-of heights, devised
tax policies that would benefit the “plutocrats” and the large
corporations, applauded and assisted in the continued process
of business consolidation, and even used such an agency as
Wilsons Federal Trade Commission to further the process of
consolidation that it had been created to check. Secure in their
domination of national politics, the Republican Presidents of the
twenties dared even to spurn the farmers and to veto schemes to
uphold domestic prices. With the first of these Presidents, cor-
ruption, always more or less normal in state and municipal

6 See the condemnation by A Washington Correspondent: “The Pro-
gressives of the Senate,” American Mercury , Vol. XVI (April 1929), pp.
385-93, in which the Progressives, excepting George W. Norris and
Thomas Walsh, are denounced for their lack of militancy and competence
and for their underlying party regularity. Senator Peter Norbeck, who was
often m the Progressive camp, wrote confidentially to a friend: “The
American Mercury article is making quite a sensation around here because
much of it is true.” Reinhard Luthin: “Smith Wildman Brookhart of
Iowa: Insurgent Agrarian Politician,” Agricultural History, Vol. XXV
(October 1951), p. 194.

284

THE AGE OF REFORM

politics, moved to Washington; when it was exposed by insur-
gents, no one seemed to care, for the Republicans were returned
to power with overwhelming majorities. 6 Nothing else could
have made quite so clear how little the nation at large re-
sponded to the old Progressive rallying cries.

Among the intellectuals themselves, upon whose activities the
political culture of Progressivism had always been so dependent,
there was a marked retreat from politics and public values to-
ward the private and personal sphere, and even in those with a
strong impulse toward dissent, bohemianism triumphed over
radicalism. Among the writers of the younger generation John
Dos Passos was almost alone in his concern for what had been
called “the social question.” As for the generation of the muck-
rakers, it was now becoming the older generation, by and large;
for a man who had been thirty in the year of Theodore Roose-
velt’s sudden accession to the presidency was fifty-three in the
year of La Follette’s gallant campaign, and if he was character-
istic of his type he was in all probability the “Tired Radical” of
Walter Weyl’s essay. On the whole, it must be said, the Progres-
sive generation had few regrets. In 1926, when Frederic C.
Howe in his autobiography. Confessions of a Reformer , raised
the question: Where are the radicals? a liberal magazine held a
symposium on the subject which sounded out a good sample of
Progressive opinion. 7 Almost none of the old reformers found
it necessary to indulge in self -recrimination or apologetics, and a
few expressed the conviction that the very success of the re-
formers had made a continuation of their work unnecessary.

6 What is in fact most striking is the reaction of the respectable press,
which at first thought that the men who exposed the scandal were beneath
contempt. The New York Times called them “assassins of character,” the
New York Tribune “the Montana scandal-mongers”; others accused them of
“pure mahce and twittering hysteria.” Frederick Lewis Allen Only Yester-
day (New York, 1931), pp. 154^5, But m the Progressive era men had
grown fat and famous exposing iniquities not one tenth as significant as
Teapot Dome.

7 For the symposium, see “Where Are the Pre-War Radicals?” The
Survey , Vol. LV (February 1, 1926), pp. 536-66.

285

Chapter vh: From Progressivism to the New Deal

Several believed that the spirit of reform would revive and at-
tach itself, when it was needed, to new causes, perhaps more
radical than the old ones. But the dominant note was the feeling
that at least for the moment prosperity had cut the ground from
under all movements of reform. All seemed to have forgotten the
prosperity of the Progressive era, 8 but underneath this miscon-
ception lay one implicit prediction that proved correct: the new
indifference would last as long as the new prosperity.

But indifference is too strong, or at least too categorical a
word. For if the course of American politics and the control of
affairs by the grosser and more obtuse type of businessman was
widely accepted, the battle with America went on among the
intellectuals on a double front. This was the age of "the revolt
against the village,” the attack on the country mind, that savage
repudiation of the old pieties that one found, for instance, in
H. L. Mencken’s famous diatribe against the American farmer
and in his acidulous sketches of Wilson, Bryan, and Roosevelt.
And if American capitalism was almost everywhere accepted as
a hard fact, it was not accepted as an ideal. Where the writers
of the Progressive era had attacked the businessman for his
economic and political role, the intellectuals of the twenties still
assailed him for his personal and cultural incapacities. Where
once he had been speculator, exploiter, corrupter, and tyrant, he
had now become boob and philistine, prude and conformist, to
be dismissed with disdain along with most of the institutions

8 This common tendency to forget how much dissent the country had
been able to generate during prosperity was, of course, quickened by the
depression and New Deal experience. Possibly the reformers felt that the
prosperity of the 1920’s was better distributed than that of the Progressive
era, though the surface evidence seems to contradict this notion. Two
differences between the two eras of prosperity do stand out: the prosperity
of the twenties was characterized by a high degree of price stability, and
hence there was no class in the urban population that found itself engaged
in the race agamst inflation that I noted m chapter iv; second, the pros-
perity of the twenties was marked by the broad diffusion among the public
of new consumers’ goods that greatly eased life and made it more enter-
taining — automobiles, radios, telephones, refrigerators, movies, electrified
kitchen gadgetry.

286

THE AGE OF REFORM

of the country. Aloofness from practical politics was not the
same as complacency; but if American intelligence could be
measured by the Scopes trial, American justice by the Sacco-
Vanzetti case, American tolerance by the Klan, and American
political morals by the Prohibition farce and Teapot Dome, it
seemed simpler to catch the first finer to Europe or to retire to
the library with the American Mercury than to engage oneself
seriously with proposals to reform American fife.

The widespread revolt among liberals and intellectuals against
the village mind and the country mind was altogether sympto-
matic of the breach in Progressivism, for it had been essential to
Progressivism to keep the rural and urban insurgents in har-
mony. For its achievements in the national arena — whether in
the fine of railroad regulation, anti-trust laws, or financial reform
— the Populist-Progressive tradition had always been dependent
upon the support it could muster from the West and the South,
from the agrarian flanks of reform. Now it was precisely in the
West and the South, in the old Bryan country, that the public
mood swung most sharply away from the devotion to necessary
reforms that had characterized Progressivism at its best. To be
sure, the new prosperity of the twenties was spottiest in the
farm belt, and there the old Populist discontents were not al-
together forgotten. But the strongest enthusiasms of the rural
and small-town Americans who understood and loved Bryan
were now precisely what the more sophisticated urban Pro-
gressive leadership disdained: the crusade to protect funda-
mentalist religion from modem science, which had its culmi-
nation in the Scopes trial; the defense of the eighteenth amend-
ment from all criticism at all costs; and the rallying of the
Ku Klux Klan against the Catholics, the Negroes, and the Jews.
The pathetic postwar career of Bryan himself, once the bell-
wether for so many of the genuine reforms, was a perfect epit-
ome of the collapse of rural idealism and the shabbiness of the
evangelical mind. For was it not Bryan who made a fortune
lecturing on old-time religion, attacking freedom of thought,

287

Chapter vh: From Progressivism to the New Deal

and promoting Prohibition, while his erstwhile followers cele-
brated him, no doubt inaccurately, as “the greatest Klansman of
our time”?

When the crusading debauch was over, the country's chief
inheritance from the Yankee-Protestant drive for morality and
from the tensions of the war period was Prohibition. To the
historian who likes to trace the development of the great eco-
nomic issues and to follow the main trend of class politics, the
story of Prohibition will seem like a historical detour, a mean-
ingless nuisance, an extraneous imposition upon the main course
of history. The truth is that Prohibition appeared to the men of
the twenties as a major issue because it was a major issue, and
one of the most symptomatic for those who would follow the
trend of rural-urban conflicts and the ethnic tensions in Ameri-
can politics. It is also one of the leading clues to the reaction
against the Progressive temper. For Prohibition, in the twenties,
was the skeleton at the feast, a grim reminder of the moral
frenzy that so many wished to forget, a ludicrous caricature of
the reforming impulse, of the Yankee-Protestant notion that it is
both possible and desirable to moralize private life through
public action.

To hold the Progressives responsible for Prohibition would be
to do them an injustice. Men of an urbane cast of mind, whether
conservatives or Progressives in their politics, had been gen-
erally antagonistic, or at the very least suspicious, of the pre-war
drive toward Prohibition; and on the other side there were
many advocates of Prohibition who had nothing to do with
other reforms. We cannot, however, quite ignore the diagnostic
significance of prohibitionism. For Prohibition was a pseudo-
reform, a pinched, parochial substitute for reform which had a
widespread appeal to a certain type of crusading mind . 9 It was
linked not merely to an aversion to drunkenness and to the evils

9 It is perhaps significant that such an early test of Prohibition as the
Webb-Kenyon law of 1913 tended to be supported by the Progressives in
the Senate and that most of its opponents were conservatives.

288

THE AGE OF REFORM

that accompanied it, but to the immigrant drinking masses, to
the pleasures and amenities of city life, and to the well-to-do
classes and cultivated men. It was carried about America by the
rural-evangelical virus : the country Protestant frequently
brought it with him to the city when the contraction of agricul-
ture sent him there to seek his livelihood. Students of the Prohi-
bition movement find it easy to believe that the majority senti-
ment of the country stood in favor of Prohibition at the time the
amendment was passed and for some years before; for even
many drinking people were sufficiently persuaded by the note
of moral uplift to concede that Prohibition might, after all, be a
good thing. 1 And even if the desire for Prohibition was a mi-
nority sentiment, it was the sentiment of a large minority, one
whose intensity and insistency gave its members a power
disproportionate to their numbers. Politicians, at any rate,
catered to their demands, and there were among them some —
one thinks of Bryan as Secretary of State with his much-ridi-
culed wineless dinners or of Josephus Daniels with his absurd
insistence on depriving the Navy officers of their drink — who
unquestionably believed that the conquest of the demon rum
was one of the important tasks of political life.

Prohibition had not been a sudden product of the war. The
demand for liquor reform, long familiar in American politics,
seems to have quickened during the Progressive era, notably
after about 1908, and the final victory of the amendment was
the culmination of five years of heightened agitation by the
Anti-Saloon League. The alcohol issue had been approached
with the usual Populist-Progressive arguments: it was one of
the means by which the interests, in this case the ‘whisky ring,”
fattened on the toil of the people. Drinking was pre-eminently
a vice of those classes — the plutocrats and corrupt politicians
and ignorant immigrants — which the reformers most detested or
feared. The saloon, as an institution pivotal in the life of vice

1 Peter Odegard: Pressure Politics (New York, 1928), p. 176; cf.
Charles Merz: The Dry Decade (Garden City, 1931), chapters i, ii.

289

Chapter vh: From Progressivism to the New Deal

on one side and of American urban politics on the other, fell
under particular reprobation. Like everything else, drink was
subject to muckraking, and the readers of the magazines were
entertained by articles on alcohol as "the arch enemy of prog-
ress,” "The Experiences and Observations of a New York Saloon-
Keeper,” and "The Story of an Alcohol Slave, as Told by Him-
self,” and were even titillated by such pale efforts as "Confes-
sions of a Moderate Drinker.” 2

George Kibbe Turner, a leading muckraker for S. S. McClure,
who specialized in exposing prostitution, probably went to the
heart of the Prohibition sentiment when he wrote an article at-
tacking the city saloon in which he pointed out that city people
constituted each year a larger and larger portion of the whole
population and insisted that the first thing to be done in the
movement for city reform was "to remove the terrible and un-
disciplined commercial forces which, in America, are fighting to
saturate the populations of cities with alcoholic liquor .” 3 Dur-
ing the war the alleged need to conserve materials and the
Germanic names of the leading brewers added some force to the
prohibitionist propaganda; but what stood the drys in the best
stead was the same strong undercurrent of public self-castiga-
tion, the same reaction against personal and physical indulgence
and material success, that underlay the Progressive tirades
against the plutocracy and instigated those appeals to Lincoln
Steffens to "come and show us up.” The sense that others were
fighting battles and making sacrifices in which one somehow
ought to share was greatly heightened by the war; and the dry

2 See McClures , Vol. XXXII (December 1908), pp. 1^4—61; ibid.
(January 1909), pp. 301-12; Vol. XXXIH (August 1909), pp. 426-30;
Vol. XXXIV (February 1910), pp. 448-51.

3 George Kibbe Turner: “Beer and the City Liquor Problem,” Mc-
Clure’s, Vol. XXXIII (September 1909), p. 543. For the importance of
the saloon, which was a central institution for urban politics, see Peter
Odegard, op. cit., chapter ii, which also gives an excellent account of the
drys’ conception of the saloon. It is unfortunate that no one has written a
full-dress history of the old-time saloon as an institution, though there are
interesting remimscences on the subject by George Ade and Brand Whit-
lock.

290

THE AGE OF REFORM

agitation, with its demand for self-denial, struck an increasingly
congenial note . 4 When one of the muckrakers wrote the fantasy
I have mentioned about the liberation of the country from Ger-
man invasion, he did not fail to celebrate the heroism of the
women’s clubs that drew together in a “Women’s National War
Economy League,” whose members all pledged, among many
other pledges, to buy “no jewelry or useless ornaments,” to buy
fewer clothes and cut their entertaining, and “to abstain from
cocktails, highballs and all expensive wines, also from cigarettes,
to influence husbands, fathers, brothers, sons and men friends
to do the same, and to contribute the amount thus saved to the
Woman’s National War Fund .” 5 Of course this sort of thing
could not last forever, but while it was at its pitch the dry lobby-
ists struck, and when they were finished the Prohibition mania
was fixed in the Constitution; and there it remained for almost
fifteen years, a symbol of the moral overstrain of the preceding
era, the butt of jokes, a perennial source of irritation, a memento
of the strange power of crusades for absolute morality to inten-
sify the evils they mean to destroy.

But Prohibition was more than a symbol — it was a means by
which the reforming energies of the country were transmuted
into mere peevishness. All through the period before the passage
of the Volstead Act — and especially before the emergence of the
Anti-Saloon League — when the dry crusade spoke the language
of social and humanitarian reform, leading Prohibitionists had

4 "In almost every case, I am firmly convinced, the drink problem is
fundamentally a problem in moral education; and until parents fully ap-
preciate this, and endeavor, in the upbnnging of their children, really to
establish self-control and self-denial as guiding principles of conduct , we
must expect to be called on to extend helping hands to the unhappy victims
of drink.” H. Addington Bruce: "Why Do Men Drink?” McClure's Vol.
XLII (April 1914), p. 132; italics added. Here, one may see, is another
arena for the exercise of that "absolute self-mastery” to which Woodrow
Wilson exhorted the American people.

5 Cleveland Moffett: "Saving the Nation,” McClure's , Vol. XL VI (De-
cember 1915), pp. 20 ff.

291

Chapter vn: From Progressivism to the New Deal

often been leading reformers, 6 and the churches that gave the
strongest support to the Social Gospel movement in American
Protestantism were all by the same token supporters of the dry
cause. The victory of Prohibition, the transformation of the
drinker from a victim of evil to a lawbreaker, the necessity of de-
fending a law that was widely violated, drew many one-time
reformers toward the camp of the conservatives, while the cir-
cumstances of American politics led them into Catholic-baiting
and city-baiting in 1924 and 1928. Prohibition became a low-
grade substitute for the old Social Gospel enthusiasms. 7

The Ku Klux Klan, another rural Protestant enthusiasm of the
twenties, also seemed to mock at the old reforming energies of
the pre-war period. I say rural, though the important centers of
Klan activity were the small towns of the nation almost every-
where outside the Northeast. It did not pay the often mercenary
organizers of the Klan to do the traveling and hard work that is
necessary to organize the widely scattered dirt farmers; but in
the small towns, where gullible nativists were gathered in suf-
ficient numbers to be worth organizing, the spirit of country
Protestantism was still strong, and there it was that the fiery
crosses were to be found burning. The Klan appealed to rela-
tively unprosperous 8 and uncultivated native white Protestants
who had in them a vein of misty but often quite sincere ideal-
ism. Generally they lived in areas where they had little real

6 Like Frances E. Willard, for instance, and Upton Sinclair, who as late
as 1931 wrote a book against liquor, The Wet Parade (Pasadena, 1931).
A political leader like Bryan linked the defense of Prohibition to the de-
fense of popular rule See his “Prohibition,” Outlook, Vol. CXXXIII (Feb-
ruary 7, 1923), p. 263.

7 This process has been analyzed and documented by Paul Carter: The
Decline and Revival of the Social Gospel . . . 1920-40 , unpublished doc-
toral dissertation, Columbia University, 1954, chapter iii, “Prohibition,
Left and Right.”

8 “You thmk the influential men belong here?” asked an observer in
Indiana City. “Then look at their shoes when they march m parade. The
sheet doesn't cover the shoes.” Fredenck Lewis Allen: Only Yesterday
(New York, 1931), p. 67.

292

THE AGE OF REFORM

contact with the Catholics and Jews against whom their voices
were raised, though of course in the South the Klan became the
chief carrier of white supremacy.

The Klan impulse was not usually a response to direct per-
sonal relationship or face-to-face competition, but rather the
result of a growing sense that the code by which rural and small-
town Anglo-Saxon America had lived was being ignored and
even flouted in the wicked cities, and especially by the "aliens,”
and that the old religion and morality were being snickered at
by the intellectuals. The city had at last eclipsed the country
in population and above all as the imaginative center of
American life. For a century and more the surplus rural
population, coming to the city, had been able to bring to its life
a tincture of rural nostalgia and rural ideals, but now the city
was providing to the nation at large the archetype of the good
life. It was the city that enjoyed the best of the new prosperity,
the countryside that lagged behind. But, above all, the city was
the home of liquor and bootleggers, jazz and Sunday golf, wild
parties and divorce. The magazines and newspapers, the movies
and radio, brought tidings of all this to the countryside, and
even lured children of the old American stock away from
the old ways. The blame fell upon the immigrants, the Catholics,
the Jews — and not really upon the harmless ones who lived in
the neighborhood, but upon those who peopled the remoter
Babylons like New York and Chicago. The Anglo-Saxon Ameri-
cans now felt themselves more than ever to be the representa-
tives of a threatened purity of race and ideals, a threatened
Protestantism, even a threatened integrity of national allegiance
— for the war and its aftermath had awakened them to the reali-
zation that the country was full of naturalized citizens still in-
tensely concerned with the politics of Europe and divided in
their loyalties . 9

9 In understanding the Klan, John M. Meckhns The Ku Klux Klan
(New York, 1924) is helpful.

293

Chapter vh: From Progressivism to the New Deal

The Klans Imperial Wizard and Emperor, Hiram Wesley
Evans, once wrote a candid and at points eloquent statement of
Klan aims which states as clearly as any analyst could the re-
lation between the movement and the decline of rural Protes-
tant America : 1 ". . . Nordic Americans for the last genera-
tion have found themselves increasingly uncomfortable and
finally deeply distressed. There appeared first confusion in
thought and opinion, a groping hesitancy about national affairs
and private life alike, in sharp contrast to the clear, straightfor-
ward purposes of our earlier years. There was futility in religion,
too, which was in many ways even more distressing. ... Fi-
nally came the moral breakdown that has been going on for
two decades. One by one all our traditional moral standards
went by the boards, or were so disregarded that they ceased to
be binding. The sacredness of our Sabbath, of our homes, of
chastity, and finally even of our right to teach our own children
in our own schools fundamental facts and truths were torn away
from us. Those who maintained the old standards did so only in
the face of constant ridicule.

"Along with this went economic distress. The assurance for
the future of our children dwindled. We found our great cities
and the control of much of our industry and commerce taken
over by strangers, who stacked the cards of success and pros-
perity against us. Shortly they came to dominate our govern-
ment. The bloc system by which this is done is now familiar to
all. ...

"So the Nordic American today is a stranger in large parts of
the land his fathers gave him. . . . Our falling birth rate, the re-
sult of all this, is proof of our distress. We no longer feel that
we can be fair to children we bring into the world, unless we
can make sure from the start that they shall have capital or edu-
cation or both, so that they need never compete with those who

1 Hiram Wesley Evans: “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism,” North
American Review , Vol. CCXIII ( March- April— May 1926), pp. 33-63.

294

THE AGE OF REFORM

now fill the lower rungs of the ladder of success. We no longer
dare risk letting our youth make its own way" in the conditions
under which we live. . . .

“We are a movement of the plain people, very weak in the
matter of culture, intellectual support, and trained leadership.
We are demanding ... a return of power into the hands of
the everyday, not highly cultured, not overly intellectualized,
but entirely unspoiled and not de- Americanized, average citizen
of the old stock. Our members and leaders are all of this class —
the opposition of the intellectuals and liberals who held the
leadership, betrayed Americanism ... is almost automatic.

“This is undoubtedly a weakness. It lays us open to the charge
of being hicks’ and rubes’ and ‘drivers of second hand Fords/
We admit it. . . . Every popular movement has suffered from
just this handicap, yet the popular movements have been the
mainsprings of progress, and have usually had to win against
the hest people’ of their time.”

The Klansmen felt themselves to be on the defensive against
encroaching evils — but these evils were also temptations. The
Klansmen had the characteristic preoccupation of censors with
the thing censored. (For this reason it was a particularly terrible
blow to them when one of their most exalted hobgoblins, the
leader of the powerful Indiana Klan, was convicted for a rape-
murder. ) In many places they presumed to set themselves up as
custodians of the public morals or as informal enforcement
agents for Prohibition. If a covert yearning for the license of the
city underlay some of their activities, an acknowledged need for
romance and the exotic may have heightened their hatred of
Catholicism. While the Catholics were the primary objects of
their resentment, at least outside the South, among the most
striking features of the Klan was its enthusiasm for things sug-
gestive of Catholic practices — its elaborate hierarchy of
Cyclopses, Kleagles, Klaliffs, Klokards, Kluds, Kligrapps,
Klabees, and Klexters, its pride in its ritual (which, said the
Imperial Wizard, the members of other orders admitted to

295

Chapter vn: From Progressivism to the New Deal

be beautiful and extremely dignified), and its clean white vest-
ments, which every layman could wear. 2

Some estimates of Klan strength indicate that at its peak the
Klan had a membership of a little less than 4,000, 000, 3 and if this
figure is too high for enrolled members, it can hardly be too high
if it embraces as well those whose sentiments were represented
by the Klan but who lived outside the reach of its organizing
efforts. At any rate its influence was used in the service of politi-
cal reaction; and the popularity of a man like Bryan among the
Klansmen in some areas suggests that its followers included
large numbers who had once given their support to the cause of
rural reformism.

The Prohibition and Klan issues always divided the Demo-
crats more sharply than the Republicans, and it was within the
Democratic Party that the ethnic tensions in American life were
more dramatically acted out. Moreover, the collapse of the
Democratic Party after the war was so severe that it brought
about an effectual breakdown of the two-party system and of
useful opposition. The Democrats had traditionally been the mi-
nority party since the Civil War, but the balance of the parties
during the Progressive era had been close enough to force op-
portunistic politicians within the Republican ranks to stave off
public criticism by adopting in some form many of the most ap-
pealing Democratic proposals. In 1912 only the Republican split
had made it possible for Wilson to put an end to sixteen years of
Republican rule, while Wilson s narrow re-election in 1916 rested
upon his success in staying out of the war. The political capital
based on the cry: "He kept us out of war” was of course al-
together dissipated, and in 1920 the national Democratic ticket
polled only 34.5 per cent of the total vote, which was the poorest

2 There were, it should be recalled, four “Kloramc Orders,” of which
the two most dignified were “Knights of the Great Forrest (The Order of
American Chivalry)” and “Knights of the Midnight Mystery (Superior
Order of Knighthood and Spiritual Philosophies).” Stanley Frost: The
Challenge of the Klan (Indianapolis, 1924), pp. 298-9.

8 Ibid., pp. 7-8.

296

THE AGE OF REFORM

showing of any major-party ticket since the Civil War era. 4 5 This
disaster, followed by the bitter wrangling and the interminable
balloting of the 1924 convention, all but finished the Democrats
as a serious opposition. 6 It was the wide gap between the parties
that made it easier for the Republican standpatters to rebuff
the farmers, survive the exposure of corruption, and ignore the
La Follette revolt of 1924, for it is when the major-party contest
is quite close that third-party revolts are most likely to have a
serious impact.

It was not so much in the La Follette movement as in the
Democratic Party that the most interesting denouement of
Progressivism was to be found and in which the problems of
future reform politics were most clearly posed. For it was within
the Democratic Party that the conflict between the rural Prot-
estant Yankee and the urban machines raged at its highest. It
was in the twenties and in the person of A1 Smith that urban
immigrant Catholic America first produced a national hero.
Smith was a paradox, for he was a Tammanyite and yet a
Progressive, a product of an urban machine whose name was
synonymous with corruption, and yet a political leader whose
governorship gave ample evidence of warm interest in popular
welfare. A Catholic, a wet, a graduate of the city streets who
had never been to college, an adroit politician with a history of
genuine achievement, he became a symbol of the possibilities of
urban America. With his coarse voice and uncertain pronuncia-
tion and syntax he was a perfect victim for American snobbism,
but for the same reason he was a sympathetic figure to those
who were shut out from the respectabilities of American middle-
class life, and above all to the immigrant stocks. Although the
gates to further large-scale immigration had been shut, the

4 In the popular vote, though not in the electoral college, Cox was
beaten by Harding even more decisively than Landon was beaten by
Roosevelt in 1936, for Landon had 36.4 per cent of the total vote.

5 In 1924 John W. Davis, the Democratic candidate, received only

28.8 per cent of the total vote, Coohdge 54.1 per cent. La Follette 16.6
per cent.

297

Chapter vh: From Progressivism to the New Deal

active power of the immigrants in politics was just beginning to
be felt. The first generation had been relatively passive and
submissive, but now the second and even the third generation of
the descendants of the great wave of the late nineteenth century
were coming of age. They were also growing in pride and self-
consciousness. Their interest in politics as something more than
a medium of the barest adjustment to American life was be-
ginning to be aroused. Many of them had taken an interest in
politics for the first time in connection with the European war,
which awakened old loyalties, and many had been moved for
the first time to violent enthusiasms on one side or the other by
the policies of Wilson, which had an intimate bearing on the
fate of almost every European country. Their pride, and often
their family plans, had been affected by the closing of the gates
in 1921. Their leisure and their amusements had been struck
at by the preposterous restrictions of Prohibition, and even
their sense of security in America was threatened by the antics
of the Klan. To the immigrants, thus aroused, Smith became
a natural leader, the more esteemed because the snobs of native
stock looked down upon him. The ethnic conflict, heightened by
the fight over Prohibition, became during an age of prosperity
far more acute than any economic issue.

The ethnic battle went through two phases. The first was
fought out within the Democratic Party in 1924. The rural rep-
resentatives, from the old Bryan constituency, and the Smith
followers battled over their differences for seventeen days at
Madison Square Garden, while Smith and William Gibbs
McAdoo deadlocked the convention for 103 ballots. The fierce-
ness of the squabble was heightened by the dead even equipoise
between the forces. On the issue of denouncing the Klan by
name the final roll-call decided in the negative by a vote of
543% o to 542% o- The delegates left after having nominated a
man not conspicuously involved with either faction but also
without marked appeal to either, and his showing at the polls
was pitiful. Four years later the Smith forces carried the day

£98

THE AGE OF REFORM

and named their man, and now the ethnic battle was fought out
between the major parties rather than within one of them. Al-
though Smith represented more liberal views than Hoover and
was supported by the liberal intelligentsia, both parties truckled
so openly to big business that no major economic identification
was at stake, 6 and the election was fought out quite clearly
along the division between the dry-Protestant-rural and the wet-
Catholic-urban-immigrant affiliations. 7

Smiths overwhelming defeat in 1928 (he was beaten almost
as badly as four years later Hoover was beaten by Roosevelt)
diverted attention from some of the major undercurrents in
American political life. For one thing, the election inflicted upon
American Catholics, in their civic capacity, a trauma from which
they never fully recovered and the consequences of which still
haunt the nation. Although Hoover, as the candidate of the
incumbent party in a time of prosperity, and the inheritor of the
then normal Republican majority, would almost certainly have
been elected in any case, the dimensions of his victory had a
great deal to do with the personal snobbery and religious bigotry
invoked against Smith. Not only did the election underline the
fact that it was impossible for a Catholic to be elected president,
but the underground campaign impugned the Americanism of
Catholics and thus gave a blow to their efforts at assimilation
and at the achievement of a full American identity.

Of equal importance weie the rise of an urban politics, and
the shrinkage of the Republican majority in the great industrial
centers. As Samuel Lubell has pointed out, this process went on

6 Peel and Donnelly: The 1928 Campaign , p. 79. It is true, of course,
that Smith attempted more to appeal to those groups which were dis-
affected by their failure to share m the general prosperity, and that Hoover
emphasized the Republican claims to the authorship of prosperity.

7 Cf. the remark of Walter Lippmann: “Quite apart even from the
severe opposition of the prohibitionists, the objection to Tammany, the
sectional objection to New York, there is an opposition to Smith which is
as authentic and, it seems to me, as poignant as his support It is inspired
by the feeling that the clamorous life of the city should not be acknowl-
edged as the American ideal/' Men of Destiny (New York, 1927), p. 8.

299

Chapter vh: From Progressivism to the New Deal

almost unnoticed, under the cover of Republican victories. But
even in those days of Republican triumph, the Republican plu-
rality in the twelve largest cities of the nation shrank from 1,638,-
000 in 1920 to 1,252,000 in 1924 and fell away altogether before
a Democratic plurality of 38,000 in 1928. As Lubell remarks, the
Republican hold on the cities was broken not by Roosevelt but
by Smith. “Before the Roosevelt Revolution there was an A1
Smith Revolution.” 8 The growing Americanization and the in-
creasing political awareness of the urban immigrant had set in
motion an undercurrent that was pulling away from the Re-
publican Party, for in most great centers, the working class,
heavily immigrant. Catholic, and wet, and “democratic” in its
social bias, moved into the Democratic Party far more readily
than it did into the party of Coolidge and Hoover.

What was evident, too, after the internal Democratic strife
of 1924 and the defeat of Smith in 1928 was that the Demo-
cratic Party, when it was finally to have an opportunity really
to challenge the Republicans, must make this challenge behind
a candidate who could surmount the feuding that had almost
torn the party to pieces. No one realized in 1928 how soon and
with what favorable auspices that challenge would be made,
but it was becoming clear who could best make it. Franklin D.
Roosevelt had long been a Smith supporter and had placed
Smith in nomination at the 1924 convention, and yet he was
not identified with Tammany in the public mind. At the same
time he was a Protestant, and an old-family American, an up-
state New Yorker who could make some claims to being a
gentleman farmer. As an Assistant Secretary of the Navy under
Wilson and as Cox’s running mate in the ill-fated campaign
of 1920, he had roots in the Progressive past and had made
friendships throughout the country that he had not permitted
the battles of the twenties to destroy. He was, in short, a
thoroughly skilled professional politician who had managed

8 Lubell, op. cit., pp. 34r-5. Lub ell’s analysis of the ethnic-religious
factor in American politics is extremely revealing.

300

THE AGE OF REFORM

to walk the narrow line between the party factions and maintain
relations in both camps. It was his gift to be the first major
leader in the history of American reform to surmount the old
dualism, so troublesome to the Progressives, between the politi-
cal ethos of the urban machine and that of nativist Protestant
America,

in. The New Departure

The Great Depression, which broke the mood of the twenties al-
most as suddenly as the postwar reaction had killed the Pro-
gressive fervor, rendered obsolete most of the antagonisms that
had flavored the politics of the postwar era. Once again the de-
mand for reform became irresistible, and out of the chaotic and
often mutually contradictory schemes for salvation that arose
from all corners of the country the New Deal took form. In the
years 1933-8 the New Deal sponsored a series of legislative
changes that made the enactments of the Progressive era seem
timid by comparison, changes that, in their totality, carried the
politics and administration of the United States farther from the
conditions of 1914 than those had been from the conditions of
1880.

It is tempting, out of a desire for symmetry and historical
continuity, to see in the New Deal a return to the preoccupations
of Progressivism, a resumption of the work of reform that had
begun under Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and a
consummation of the changes that were proposed in the half-
dozen years before the first World War. Much reason can be
found for yielding to this temptation. Above all, the New Deal-
ers shared with the Progressives a far greater willingness than
had been seen in previous American history to make use of the
machinery of government to meet the needs of the people and
supplement the workings of the national economy. There are
many occasions in its history when the New Deal, especially in

301

Chapter vn: From Frogressivism to the New Deal

its demand for organization, administration, and management
from a central focus, seems to stand squarely in the tradition
of the New Nationalism for which such Progressives as Herbert
Croly had argued. Since it is hardly possible for any society
to carve out a completely new vocabulary for every new prob-
lem it faces, there is also much in the New Deal rhetoric that
is strongly reminiscent of Progressivism. Like the Progressives,
the New Dealers invoked a larger democracy; and where the
Progressives had their "plutocrats, 55 the New Dealers had their
“economic royalists. 55 F. D. K, asserting in his first inaugural
address that “The money changers have fled from their high
seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that
temple to the ancient truths, 55 sounds very much like almost any
inspirational writer for McClure’s in the old days. 9 On a number
of particular issues, moreover, like the holding-company ques-
tion, monopoly, and public power, one feels as though one is
treating again, in the New Deal, with familiar problems — just
as, in the crucial early days of 1933, the formation of a strong
bloc of inflationist Senators from the West seemed to hark back
to the Populist movement.

Still, granting that absolute discontinuities do not occur in
history, and viewing the history of the New Deal as a whole,
what seems outstanding about it is the drastic new departure
that it marks in the history of American reformism. 1 The New
Deal was different from anything that had yet happened in the
United States: different because its central problem was unlike

9 Naturally there was also some continuity in personnel, for F. D. R.
himself was only one of a considerable number of American leaders who
had been young Progressives before the war and were supporters of the
major reforms of the thirties However, one could draw up an equally
formidable list — chiefly Republican insurgents of the Bull Moose era, but
also many Democrats — who had supported Progressive measures and later
became heated critics of the New Deal.

1 Here I find myself in agreement with the view expressed by Samuel
Lubell ( op. cit , p. 3 ) : "The distinctive feature of the political revolution
which Franklin D. Roosevelt began and Truman inherited lies not m its
resemblance to the political wars of Andrew Jackson or Thomas Jefferson,
but m its abrupt break with the continuity of the past.”

302

THE AGE OF REFORM

the problems of Progressivism; different in its ideas and its spirit
and its techniques. Many men who had lived through Pro-
gressivism and had thought of its characteristic proposals as
being in the main line of American traditions, even as being
restoratives of those traditions, found in the New Deal an out-
rageous departure from everything they had known and valued,
and so could interpret it only as an effort at subversion or as the
result of overpowering alien influences. Their opposition was all
too often hysterical, but in their sense that something new had
come into American political and economic life they were quite
right.

Consider, to begin, the fundamental problem that the New
Dealers faced, as compared with the problems of the Progres-
sives. When Theodore Roosevelt took office in 1901, the country
was well over three years past a severe depression and in the
midst of a period of healthy economic development. Its farmers
were more prosperous than they had been for about forty years,
its working class was employed and gaining in living standards,
and even its middle class was far busier counting the moral costs
of success than it was worrying about any urgent problems of
family finance. When F. D. R. took his oath of office, the entire
working apparatus of American economic life had gone to
smash. The customary masters and leaders of the social order
were themselves in a state of near panic. Millions were unem-
ployed, and discontent had reached a dangerous pitch on the
farms and in the cities.

Indeed, the New Deal episode marks the first in the history
of reform movements when a leader of the reform party took the
reins of a government confronted above all by the problems of a
sick economy. To be sure, the whole nineteenth-century tradi-
tion of reform in American politics was influenced by experience
with periodic economic breakdowns; but its political leaders had
never had to bear responsibility for curing them. Jefferson in
1801, Jackson in 1829, and after them T. R. and Wilson — all
took over at moments when the economy was in good shape.

303

Chapter vn: From Progressivism to the New Deal

While each of them had experience with economic relapse —
Jefferson in 1807 as the consequence of his embargo policies,
the Jacksonians briefly in 1834 and again after 1837, T. R. briefly
during the “bankers’ panic” of 1907, and Wilson with a momen-
tary recession just before the wartime boom — their thinking,
and the thinking of the movements they represented, was cen-
tered upon sharing an existing prosperity among the various
social classes rather than upon restoring a lost prosperity or
preventing recurrent slumps.

The earlier American tradition of political protest had been
a response to the needs of entrepreneurial classes or of those
who were on the verge of entrepreneurship — the farmers, small
businessmen, professionals, and occasionally the upper caste of
the artisans or the working class. The goal of such classes had
generally been to clear the way for new enterprises and new
men, break up privileged business, big businesses, and monopo-
lies, and give the small man better access to credit. The ideas
of this Progressive tradition, as one might expect, were founded
not merely upon acceptance but even upon glorification of the
competitive order. The Jeffersonians, the Jacksonians, and after
them most of the Progressives had believed in the market
economy, and the only major qualification of this belief they
cared to make stemmed from their realization that the market
needed to be policed and moralized by a government responsive
to the needs of the economic beginner and the small entrepre-
neur. Occasionally, very occasionally, they had argued for the
exercise of a few positive functions on the part of the national
government, but chiefly they preferred to keep the positive func-
tions of government minimal, and, where these were necessary,
to keep them on the state rather than put them on the national
level. Their conceptions of the role of the national government
were at first largely negative and then largely preventive. In the
Jeffersonian and Jacksonian days it was to avoid excessive ex-
penditure and excessive taxation, to refrain from giving privi-
leged charters. Later, in the corporate era, it was to prevent

304

THE AGE OF REFORM

abuses by the railroads and the monopolists, to check and to reg-
ulate unsound and immoral practices. It is of course true that
some of the more “advanced” thinkers of the Populist and Pro-
gressive movements began to think tentatively of more positive
functions for government, but it was just such proposals — the
subtreasury scheme for agricultural credits and the various pub-
lic-ownership proposals — that provoked the greatest opposition
when attempts were made to apply them on a national scale.

The whole reformist tradition, then, displayed a mentality
founded on the existence of an essentially healthy society; it
was chiefly concerned not with managing an economy to meet
the problems of collapse but simply with democratizing an
economy in sound working order. Managing an economy in
such a way as to restore prosperity is above all a problem of or-
ganization, 2 while democratizing a well-organized economy had
been, as we have seen, in some important respects an attempt
to find ways of attacking or limiting organization. Hence the
Progressive mind was hardly more prepared than the conserva-
tive mind for what came in 1929. Herbert Hoover, an old Bull
Mooser, while more disposed to lead the country than any
president had been in any previous depression, was unprepared
for it, and was prevented from adjusting to it by a doctrinaire
adherence to inherited principles. F. D. R. — a fairly typical
product of Progressivism who had first won office in 1910 — was
also unprepared for it in his economic thinking, as anyone will
see who examines his career in the 1920’s; 3 but he was suffi-
ciently opportunistic and flexible to cope with it somewhat more
successfully.

Hoover, an engineer born in Iowa, represented the moral

2 The closest thing to an earlier model for the first efforts of the New
Deal was not the economic legislation of Progressivism but the efforts of
the Wilson administration to organize the economy for the first World
War. Hugh Johnson in the NR A and George Peek m the AAA were in
many ways recapitulating the experience they had had m the War Indus-
tries Board under Bernard Baruch.

3 See Frank FreideFs Franklin D. Roosevelt: the Ordeal (Boston, 1954),
and his forthcoming volume on F. D. R/s governorship.

305

Chapter vh: From Progressivism to the New Deal

traditions of native Protestant politics. An amateur in politics
who had never run for office before he was elected President
in 1928, he had no patience with the politician s willingness to
accommodate, and he hung on, as inflexibly as the situation
would permit, to the private and voluntary methods that had
always worked well in his administrative career. 4 F. D. R., a sea-
soned professional politician who had learned his trade strad-
dling the terrible antagonisms of the 1920’s, was thoroughly at
home in the realities of machine politics and a master of the ma-
chine techniques of accommodation. Unlike Hoover, he had few
hard and fast notions about economic principles, but he knew
that it would be necessary to experiment and improvise. “It is
common sense,” he said in 1932, “to take a method and try it. If
it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try some-
thing.”

To describe the resulting flood of legislation as economic
planning would be to confuse planning with interventionism.
Planning was not quite the word for the New Deal: considered
as an economic movement, it was a chaos of experimentation.
Genuine planners like Rexford Guy Tugwell found themselves
floundering amid the cross-currents of the New Deal, and ended
in disillusionment. But if, from an economic standpoint, the
New Deal was altogether lacking in that rationality or con-
sistency which is implied in the concept of planning, from a
political standpoint it represented a masterly shifting equipoise
of interests. And little wonder that some of the old Republican
insurgents shuddered at its methods. If the state was believed
neutral in the days of T. R. because its leaders claimed to sanc-
tion favors for no one, the state under F. D. R. could be called
neutral only in the sense that it offered favors to everyone.

Even before F. D. R. took office a silent revolution had taken

4 Characteristically, also, Hoover accepted what might be called the
nativist view of the Great Depression: it came from abroad; it was the
product, not of any deficiencies m the American economy, but of reper-
cussions of the unsound institutions of Europe,

306

THE AGE OF REFORM

place in public opinion, the essential character of which can be
seen when we recall how little opposition there was in the coun-
try, at the beginning, to the assumption of the New Dealers that
henceforth, for the purposes of recovery, the federal govern-
ment was to be responsible for the condition of the labor market
as a part of its concern with the industrial problem as a whole.
Nothing revolutionary was intended — but simply as a matter of
politics it was necessary for the federal government to assume
primary responsibility for the relief of the unemployed. And,
simply as a matter of politics, if the industrialists were to be
given the power to write enforceable codes of fair practice, labor
must at least be given some formal recognition of its right of
collective bargaining. Certainly no one foresaw, in the first year
or two of the New Deal, that the immense infusions of purchas-
ing power into the economy through federal unemployment
relief would be as lasting or as vital a part of the economy
of the next several years as they proved in fact to be. Nor did
anyone foresee how great and poweiful a labor movement
would be called into being by the spirit and the promise of the
New Deal and by the partial recovery of its first few years. Rut
by the end of 1937 it was clear that something had been
added to the social base of reformism. The demands of a large
and powerful labor movement, coupled with the interests of the
unemployed, gave the later New Deal a social-democratic tinge
that had never before been present in American reform move-
ments. Hitherto concerned very largely with reforms of an
essentially entrepreneurial sort and only marginally with social
legislation, American political reformism was fated henceforth
to take responsibility on a large scale for social security, unem-
ployment insurance, wages and hours, and housing. 5

5 As the counsel for the National Association of Manufacturers put it:
“Regulation has passed from the negative stage of merely preventing un-
lawful and improper conduct, to the positive stage of directing and con-
trolling the character and form of business activity The concept that the
function of government was to prevent exploitation by virtue of superior
power has been replaced by the concept that it is the duty of government

307

Chapter vh: From Progressivism to the New Deal

Still more imposing was the new fiscal role of the federal gov-
ernment. Again, none of this was premeditated. Large-scale
spending and unbalanced budgets were, in the beginning, a
response to imperative needs. While other schemes for recovery
seemed to fall short of expectations, spending kept the economy
going; and it was only when F. D. R. tried in 1937 to cut back
expenditures that he learned that he had become the prisoner
of his spending policies, and turned about and made a neces-
sity into a virtue. His spending policy never represented, at any
time before the outbreak of the war, an unambiguous or
wholehearted commitment to Keynesian economics. Here only
the war itself could consummate the fiscal revolution that the
New Deal began. In 1940 Lord Keynes published in the United
States an article in which he somewhat disconsolately reviewed
the American experience with deficit spending during the pre-
vious decade. “It seems politically impossible,” he concluded,
“for a capitalistic democracy to organize expenditure on the scale
necessary to make the grand experiment which would prove my
case — except in war conditions.” He then added that prepara-
tions for war and the production of armaments might teach
Americans so much about the potentialities of their economy
that it would be “the stimulus, which neither the victory nor the
defeat of the New Deal could give you, to greater individual
consumption and a higher standard of life.” 6 How remarkably
prophetic this was we can now see. There had been under
peacetime conditions an immense weeping and wailing over
the budgets of F. D. R. — which at their peak ran to seven bil-
lion dollars. Now we contemplate budgets of over eighty billion
dollars with somewhat less anguish, because we know that
most of this expenditure will be used for defense and will not

to provide security against all the major hazards of hfe — against unemploy-
ment, accident, illness, old age, and death.” Thomas P. Jenkin. Reactions
of Major Groups to Positive Government in the United States (Berkeley,
1945), pp. 300-1.

6 J. M. Keynes: "The Umted States and the Keynes Plan,” New Re-
public, Vol. CIII (July 29, 1940), p. 158.

308

THE AGE OF REFORM

be put to uses that are politically more controversial. But,
above all, we have learned things about the possibilities of our
economy that were not dreamed of in 1933, much less in 1903.
While men still grow angry over federal fiscal and tax policies,
hardly anyone doubts that in the calculable future it will be the
fiscal role of the government that more than anything else deter-
mines the course of the economy.

And what of the old Progressive issues? They were bypassed,
sidestepped, outgrown — anything but solved. To realize how
true this was, one need only look at the New Deal approach to
those two betes noires of the Progressive mind, the machines
and the trusts.

Where the Progressives spent much of their energy, as we
have seen, trying to defeat the bosses and the machines and to
make such changes in the political machinery of the country as
would bring about direct popular democracy and "restore gov-
ernment to the people,” the New Deal was almost completely
free of such crusading. To the discomfort of the old-fashioned,
principled liberals who were otherwise enthusiastic about his
reforms, F. D. R. made no effort to put an end to bossism and
corruption, but simply ignored the entire problem. In the
interest of larger national goals and more urgent needs, he
worked with the bosses wherever they would work with him —
and did not scruple to include one of the worst machines of all,
the authoritarian Hague machine in New Jersey. As for the res-
toration of democracy, he seemed well satisfied with his feeling
that the broadest public needs were at least being served by the
state and that there was such an excellent rapport between the
people and their executive leadership. 7

The chief apparent exception to this opportune and manage-
rial spirit in the field of political reform — namely, the attempt

7 Of course to speak of democracy in purely domestic terms is to under-
estimate the world-wide significance of the New Deal. At a time when
democracy was everywhere m retreat, the New Deal gave to the world an
example of a free nation copmg with the problems of its economy in a
democratic and humane way.

309

Chapter vh: From Progressivism to the New Deal

to enlarge the Supreme Court — proves on examination to be no
exception at all. F. D. R.’s fight over the Supreme Court was be-
gun, after all, not in the interest of some large “democratic”
principle or out of a desire to reform the Constitutional machin-
ery as such, but because the Court’s decisions had made it seem
impossible to achieve the managerial reorganization of society
that was so urgently needed. His first concern was not that
judicial review was “undemocratic” but that the federal govern-
ment had been stripped, as he thought, of its power to deal
effectively with economic problems. Nor was this fight waged in
the true Progressive spirit. The Progressives, too, had had their
difficulties with the judiciary, and had responded with the char-
acteristically principled but practically difficult proposal for
the recall of judicial decisions. In short, they raised for recon-
sideration, as one might expect of principled men, the entire
question of judicial review. F. D. R. chose no such method . 8
To reopen the entire question of the propriety of judicial review
of the acts of Congress under a representative democracy would
have been a high-minded approach to what he felt was a Con-
stitutional impasse, but it would have ended perhaps even more
disastrously than the tactic he employed. F. D. R. avoided such
an approach, which would have involved a cumbersome effort
to amend the Constitution, and devised a “gimmick” to achieve
his ends — the pretense that the age of the judges prevented
them from remaining abreast of their calendar, and the demand
for the right to supplement the judiciary, to the number of six,
with an additional judge for each incumbent who reached the
age of seventy without retiring.

8 Indeed, in his message calling for reorganization Roosevelt declared
that his proposal would make unnecessary any fundamental changes in the
powers of the courts or in the Constitution, “changes which involve con-
sequences so far-reaching as to cause uncertainty as to the wisdom of such
a course.” It remained for the leading senatorial opponent of the bill.
Senator Burton K. Wheeler, to advocate an amendment to the Constitu-
tion permitting Congress to override judicial vetoes of its acts. Charles A.
and Mary R. Beard. America in Midpassage (New York, 1939), Vol. I,
p. 355.

310

THE AGE OF REFORM

Students of the Court fight are fond of remarking that Roose-
velt won his case, because the direction of the Court’s de-
cisions began to change while the fight was in progress and be-
cause Justice Van Devanter’s retirement enabled the President
to appoint a liberal justice and decisively change the composi-
tion of the Court. 9 It seems important, however, to point out
that a very heavy price had to be paid for even this pragmatic
attempt to alter a great and sacrosanct conservative institution.
The Court fight alienated many principled liberals and enabled
many of F. D. R.’s conservative opponents to portray him to the
public more convincingly as a man who aspired to personal
dictatorship and aimed at the subversion of the Republic.

If we look at the second of the two great foes of Progressiv-
ism, big business and monopoly, we find that by the time of the
New Deal public sentiment had changed materially. To be sure,
the coming of the depression and the revelation of some of the
less palatable business practices of the 1920’s brought about a
climate of opinion in which the leadership of business, and
particularly of big business, was profoundly distrusted and
bitterly resented. Its position certainly was, in these respects,
considerably weaker than it had been twenty-five years be-
fore. Still, by 1933 the American public had lived with the great
corporation for so long that it was felt to be domesticated, and
there was far more concern with getting business life on such a
footing as would enable it to provide jobs than there was with
breaking up the larger units. The New Deal never developed a

9 Presumably it will always be debated whether the new harmony be-
tween Congress and the Supreme Court that developed even while the
Court fight was going on can be attributed to Roosevelt’s Court reform
bill. Merlo Pusey m his Charles Evans Hughes (Vol. II, pp. 766 ff.) argues
that the change in the Court’s decisions was not a pohtical response to the
legislative struggle. He points out, among other things, that the New Deal
legislation that came before the Court after the NRA and AAA decisions
was better drafted. It is beyond doubt, however, that the resignation of
Van Devanter was precipitated by the Court fight. Ibid., Vol. II, p. 761.
The fact that advocates of both sides can go on arguing about who won
the fight is the best evidence that the issue was satisfactorily settled. It
aroused so much feeling that an unambiguous victory for either side would
have been unfortunate.

311

Chapter vh: From Progressivism to the New Deal

clear or consistent line on business consolidation, and New
Dealers fought over the subject in terms that were at times
reminiscent of the old battles between the trust-busters and the
trust-regulators. What can be said, however, is that the subject
of bigness and monopoly was subordinated in the New Deal
era to that restless groping for a means to bring recovery that
was so characteristic of Roosevelt’s efforts. The New Deal began
not with a flourish of trust-busting but rather, in the NRA, with
an attempt to solve the problems of the business order through
a gigantic system of governmentally underwritten codes that
would ratify the trustification of society. One of the first political
setbacks suffered by the New Deal arose from just this — for it
had put the formation of its codes of fair practice so completely
in the hands of the big-business interests that both small busi-
nessmen and organized labor were seriously resentful. Only five
years from the date of its passage, after the NRA had failed to
produce a sustained recovery and had been declared unconstitu-
tional by the Supreme Court, did the administration turn off and
take the opposite tack with its call for an inquiry into corporate
consolidation and business power that led to the Temporary
National Economic Committee’s memorable investigation. 1 Al-
though at the time many observers thought that the old Progres-
sive trust-busting charade was about to be resumed, the New
Deal never became committed to a categorical “dissection” of
the business order of the sort Wilson had talked of in 1912, nor
to the “demonstration” prosecutions with which T. R. had both
excited and reassured the country. The New Deal was not trying
to re-establish the competitive order that Wilson had nostalgi-
cally invoked and that T. R. had sternly insisted was no longer
possible. Its approach, as it turned out, was severely managerial,
and distinctly subordinated to those economic considerations
that would promote purchasing power and hence recovery. It
was, in short, a concerted effort to discipline the pricing policies
of businesses, not with the problem of size in mind, nor out of

1 There had been in the meantime, however, the assault upon the hold-
ing companies embodied m the so-called “death sentence” of 1935.

S12

THE AGE OF REFORM

consideration for smaller competitors, but with the purpose of
eliminating that private power to tax which is the prerogative
of monopoly, and of leaving in the hands of consumers vital
purchasing power.

History cannot quite repeat itself, if only because the partici-
pants in the second round of any experience are aware of the
outcome of the first. The anti-trust philosophers of the closing
years of the New Deal were quite aware that previous efforts
to enforce the Sherman Act had been ceremonial demonstrations
rather than serious assaults upon big business. Thurman Arnold,
who was put in charge of the anti-trust program, was well
known for his belief that earlier interpretations of the Sherman
Act had actually concealed and encouraged business consoli-
dation. In his account of the contemporary function of anti-trust
prosecution Arnold put his emphasis upon benefits for the con-
sumer and repudiated the earlier use of the Sherman Act: “Since
the consumers’ interest was not emphasized, such enforcement
efforts as existed were directed at the punishment of offenses
rather than the achievement of economic objectives. Indeed, in
very few antitrust prosecutions was any practical economic ob-
jective defined or argued with respect to the distribution of any
particular product. In this way the moral aspects of the offense,
and that will-o’-the-wisp, corporate intent, became more impor-
tant considerations than economic results. Antitrust enforce-
ment, not being geared to the idea of consumers’ interests, be-
came a hunt for offenders instead of an effort to test the validity
of organized power by its performance in aiding or preventing
the flow of goods in commerce. The result was that although the
economic ideal of a free competitive market as the cornerstone
of our economy was kept alive, no adequate enforcement staff
was ever provided to make that ideal a reality. Such, broadly
speaking, was the state of the Sherman Act from 1890 down to
the great depression.” 2

2 Thurman Arnold: The Bottlenecks of Business (New York, 1940),
p. 263.

313

Chapter vh: From Progressivism to the New Deal

But if such a position as Thurman Arnold’s can be legitimately
distinguished from the Progressive type of anti-trust, as I think
it can, there are men today whose political thinking was forged
in the service of the New Deal who go beyond him in repudiat-
ing anti-trust action as a mere attack upon size, and who take,
on the whole, an acquiescent attitude toward big business. A
few years ago John Kenneth Galbraith made quite a stir with
his book American Capitalism , whose central thesis was that the
process of business consolidation creates within itself a “counter-
vailing power” — that is, that it brings about the organization not
merely of strong sellers but of strong buyers as well, who dis-
tribute through large sectors of the economy their ability to save
through organization . 3 In Galbraith’s book, as in most recent
literature in defense of bigness, it is not the effort at disorgani-
zation but the effects of counter-organization, in labor, agricul-
ture, and government and within business itself, that are counted
upon to minimize the evils of consolidation. More recently
David Lilienthal, another graduate of the New Deal adminis-
trative agencies, has written a strong apologia for big business
that followed Galbraith in stressing the technologically progres-
sive character of large-scale industry in language that would
have horrified Brandeis and Wilson . 4 It is not clear whether the
attitudes of men like Galbraith and Lilienthal represent domi-
nant liberal sentiment today — though it may be pertinent to say
that their books brought no outpouring of protest from other
liberal writers. The spectacle of liberals defending, with what-
ever qualifications, bigness and concentration in industry sug-

3 This is a rather simplified statement of the thesis of Galbraith's
American Capitalism (Boston, 1952). Students of the history of anti-trust
ideologies will be particularly interested m Galbraith's strictures on the
TNEC Report ( pp 59-60 ) .

4 Galbraith argues that “the competition of the competitive model . . .
almost completely precludes techmcal development" and that indeed “there
must be some element of monopoly m an industry if it is to be progressive.”
Ibid., pp 91, 93, and chapter vn, passim. Cf. David Lilienthal. Big Busi-
ness: a New Era (New York, 1953), chapter vi. For another such fnendly
treatment by a former New Dealer, see Adolph A. Berle: The Twentieth
Century Capitalist Revolution (New York, 1954).

314

THE AGE OF REFORM

gests that that anti-monopoly sentiment which was so long at the
heart of Progressive thinking is no longer its central theme. The
generation for which Wilson and Brandeis spoke looked to eco-
nomic life as a field for the expression of character; modem
liberals seem to think of it quite exclusively as a field in which
certain results are to be expected. It is this change in the moral
stance that seems most worthy of remark. A generation ago, and
more, the average American was taught to expect that a career
in business would and should be in some sense a testing and
proving ground for character and manhood, and it was in these
terms that the competitive order was often made most appeal-
ing . 5 Contrariwise, those who criticized the economic order very
commonly formed their appeals within the same mold of moral
suasion: the economic order failed to bring out or reward the
desired qualities of character, to reward virtue and penalize
vice; it was a source of inequities and injustices. During the last
fifteen or twenty years, however, as Galbraith observes, "the
American radical has ceased to talk about inequality or exploi-
tation under capitalism or even its "inherent contradictions/ He
has stressed, instead, the unreliability of its performance.” 6

iv. The New Opportunism

The New Deal, and the thinking it engendered, represented the
triumph of economic emergency and human needs over in-
herited notions and inhibitions. It was conceived and exe-
cuted above all in the spirit of what Roosevelt called ""bold,

5 See, for instance, the touching letter quoted by Lilienthal (op. cit.,
p. 198), from a university graduate of the twenties: “We were dismayed at
the vista of mediocre aspiration and of compartmentalized lives. The
course of a big business career was predictable and foreclosed. It was also,
as the personnel department pointed out, secure. The appeal of graduated
salary raises and retirement on a pension was held out as the big lure. But
in my high school days the appeal had been to ambition, a good deal was
said about achievement and independence.”

6 Galbraith, op. cit., p. 70.

SIS

Chapter vn: From Progressivism to the New Deal

persistent experimentation,” and what those more critical of the
whole enterprise considered crass opportunism. In discussing
Progressivism I emphasized its traffic in moral absolutes, its
exalted moral tone. While something akin to this was by nc
means entirely absent from the New Deal, the later movemenl
showed a strong and candid awareness that what was happening
was not so much moral reformation as economic experimenta-
tion. Much of this experimentation seemed to the conservative
opponents of the New Deal as not only dangerous but immoral
The high moral indignation of the critics of the New Dea
sheds light on another facet of the period — the relative reversal
of the ideological roles of conservatives and reformers. Naturallj
in all ideologies, conservative or radical, there is a dual appeal
to ultimate moral principles and to the practical necessities oi
institutional life. Classically, however, it has been the strength
of conservatives that their appeal to institutional continuities,
hard facts, and the limits of possibility is better founded; while
it has usually been the strength of reformers that they arouse
moral sentiments, denounce injustices, and rally the indignatior
of the community against intolerable abuses. Such had been the
alignment of arguments during the Progressive era. During the
New Deal, however, it was the reformers whose appeal tc
the urgent practical realities was most impressive — to the farm-
ers without markets, to the unemployed without bread or hope
to those concerned over the condition of the banks, the invest-
ment market, and the like. It was the conservatives, on the othe]
hand, who represented the greater moral indignation and ralliec
behind themselves the inspirational literature of American life
and this not merely because the conservatives were now the
party of the opposition, but because things were being done oJ
such drastic novelty that they seemed to breach all the inherited
rules, not merely of practicality but of morality itself. Hence, ii
one wishes to look for utopianism in the 1930's, for an exaltec
faith in the intangibles of morals and character, and for mora
indignation of the kind that had once been chiefly the preroga

316

THE AGE OF REFORM

tive of the reformers, one will find it far more readily in the
editorials of the great conservative newspapers than in the liter-
ature of the New Deal. If one seeks for the latter-day equivalent
of the first George Kennan, warning the people of San Francisco
that it would do them no good to have a prosperous town if in
gaining it they lost their souls, one will find it most readily in
the 1930’s among those who opposed federal relief for the un-
employed because it would destroy their characters or who were
shocked by the devaluation of the dollar, not because they al-
ways had a clear conception of its consequences, but above all
because it smacked to them of dirtiness and dishonesty. In the
past it had been the conservatives who controlled the settlement
of the country, set up its great industrial and communications
plant, and founded the fabulous system of production and dis-
tribution upon which the country prided itself, while the reform-
ers pointed to the human costs, the sacrifice of principles, and
drew blueprints to show how the job could be better done. Now,
however, it was the reformers who fed the jobless or found them
jobs, saved the banks, humanized industry, built houses and
schools and public buildings, rescued farmers from bankruptcy,
and restored hope — while the conservatives, expropriated at
once from their customary control of affairs and from their
practical role, invoked sound principles, worried about the Con-
stitution, boggled over details, pleaded for better morals, and
warned against tyranny.

Lamentably, most of the conservative Blinking of the New
Deal era was hollow and cliche-ridden. What seems most strik-
ing about the New Deal itself, however, was that all its ferment
of practical change produced a very slight literature of political
criticism. While the changes of the Progressive era had produced
many significant books of pamphleteering or thoughtful analyses
of society — the writings of such men as Croly, Lippmann, Weyl,
Brooks Adams, Brandeis, the muckrakers. Socialist critics like
W. J. Ghent and William English Walling — the New Deal pro-
duced no comparable body of political writing that would sur-

317

Chapter vii: From Progressivism to the New Deal

vive the day’s headlines. In part this was simply a matter of
time: the Progressive era lasted over a dozen years, and most
of the significant writing it engendered came during its later
phases, particularly after 1910; whereas the dynamic phase of
the New Deal was concentrated in the six hectic years from 1933
to 1938. Perhaps still more important is the fact that the New
Deal brought with it such a rapid bureaucratic expansion and
such a complex multitude of problems that it created an im-
mense market for the skills of reform-minded Americans from
law, journalism, politics, and the professoriat. The men who
might otherwise have been busy analyzing the meaning of
events were caught up in the huge expanding bureaucracy and
put to work drafting laws that would pass the courts, lobbying
with refractory Congressmen, or relocating sharecroppers.

To this generalization there is one noteworthy exception: in
his two books. The Symbols of Government and The Folklore of
Capitalism , Thurman Arnold wrote works of great brilliance
and wit and considerable permanent significance — better books,
I believe, than any of the political criticism of the Progressive
era. 7 But what do we find in these works, the most advanced of
the New Deal camp? We find a sharp and sustained attack upon
ideologies, rational principles, and moralism in politics. We find,
in short, the theoretical equivalent of F. D. R/s opportunistic
virtuosity in practical politics — a theory that attacks theories.
For Arnold’s books, which were of course directed largely
against the ritualistic thinking of the conservatives of the 1930’s,
might stand equally well as an attack upon that moralism which
we found so insistent in the thinking of Progressivism.

Arnold’s chief concern was with the disparities between the
way society actually works and the mythology through which
the sound lawyers, economists, and moralists attempt to under-
stand it. His books are an explanation of the ritualistic and func-

7 Thurman W. Arnold: The Symbols of Government (New Haven,
1935), The Folklore of Capitalism (New Haven, 1937). By 1941 the first
of these works had gone through five printings, the second, fourteen.

318

THE AGE OF REFORM

tionally irrational character of most of the superficially rational
principles by which society lives. At the time his books were
written, the necessity of coping with a breakdown in the actual
workings of the economy had suddenly confronted men with the
operational uselessness of a great many accepted words and
ideas. The language of politics, economics, and law had itself
become so uncertain that there was a new vogue of books on
semantics and of works attempting to break "the tyranny of
words/' a literature of which Arnold’s books were by far the
most important. The greater part of Arnold’s task was to exam-
ine, and to satirize, the orthodox conservative thinking of the
moment. This is not our main concern, but what is of primary in-
terest here is the extent to which Arnold’s thinking departs from,
and indeed on occasion attacks, earlier Progressivism. The devi-
ation of Arnold’s system of values from the classic values of
American Progressivism was clear from his very terminology. I
noted, in discussing the Progressive climate of opinion, the
existence of a prevailing vocabulary of civic morals that re-
flected the disinterested thinking and the selfless action that was
expected of the good citizen. The key words of Progressivism
were terms like patriotism , citizen , democracy , law , character ,
conscience , soul , morals , service , duty , shame , disgrace , sin, and
selfishness — terms redolent of the sturdy Protestant Anglo-Saxon
moral and intellectual roots of the Progressive uprising. A search
for the key words of Arnold’s books yields: needs , organization,
humanitarian, results, technique, institution , realistic, discipline,
morale, skill, expert, habits, practical , leadership — a vocabulary
revealing a very different constellation of values arising from
economic emergency and the imperatives of a bureaucracy.

Although primarily concerned with the conservatives of the
present, Arnold paid his respects to the reformers of the past
often enough to render a New Dealer’s portrait of earlier Pro-
gressivism. He saw the reformers of the past as having occupied
themselves with verbal and moral battles that left the great
working organizations of society largely untouched. “Wherever

319

Chapter vh: From Progressivism to the New Deal

the reformers are successful — whenever they see their direct
primaries, their antitrust laws, or whatever else they base their
hopes on, in actual operation — the great temporal institutions
adapt themselves, leaving the older reformers disillusioned, like
Lincoln Steffens, and a newer set carrying on the banner ." 8 Re-
spectable people with humanitarian values, Arnold thought, had
characteristically made the mistake of ignoring the fact that "it
is not logic but organizations which rule an organized society”;
therefore they selected logical principles, rather than organiza-
tions, as the objects of their loyalties. Most liberal reform move-
ments attempt to make institutions practice what they preach,
in situations where, if this injunction were followed, the func-
tions of the institutions could not be performed . 9 Where the
Progressives had been troubled about the development of insti-
tutions and organizations, Arnold’s argument often appeared to
be an apotheosis of them.

At one point or another, Arnold had critical observations to
make on most of the staple ideas of Progressive thinking. The
Folklore of Capitalism opened with a satire on "the thinking
man," to whom most of the discourse of rational politics was
directed; and the thinking man was hardly more than a carica-
tured version of the good citizen who was taken as the central
figure in most Progressive thinking. While Progressive publicists
had devoted much of their time to preachments against what they
called "lawlessness," one of the central themes of Arnold s books
was an analysis of law and legal thinking showing that law and
respectability were so defined that a good many of the real and
necessary functions of society had to go on outside the legal
framework . 1 Similarly anti-Progressive was his attack on the

8 The Symbols of Government , p. 124.

9 The Folklore of Capitalism , pp. 375, 384.

1 Gf. The Symbols of Government , p. 34: "It is part of the function of
‘Law’ to give recognition to ideals representing the exact opposite of
established conduct . . . the function of law is not so much to guide
society as to comfort it. Belief m fundamental principles of law does not
necessarily lead to an orderly society. Such a belief is as often at the back
of revolt or disorder.”

320

THE AGE OF REFORM

anti-trust laws — a source of some amusement when he was later
put in charge of the enforcement of these laws. But Arnold did
not deny that the laws, as they had been interpreted by reform-
ers, had had some use. Their chief use, as he saw it, had been
that they permitted the organization of industry to go on while
offering comfort to those who were made unhappy by the proc-
ess. They had, then, a practical significance, but a far different
one from that which the reformers had tried to give them. The
reformers, however, had had no real strategy with which to op-
pose the great trusts: "The reason why these attacks [against
industrial organizations] always ended with a ceremony of
atonement, but few practical results, lay in the fact that there
were no new organizations growing up to take over the func-
tions of those under attack. The opposition was never able to
build up its own commissary and its service of supply. It was
well supplied with orators and economists, but it lacked practi-
cal organizers. A great cooperative movement in America might
have changed the power of the industrial empire. Preaching
against it, however, simply resulted in counterpreaching. And
the reason for this was that the reformers themselves were
caught in the same creeds which supported the institutions they
were trying to reform. Obsessed with a moral attitude toward
society, they thought in Utopias. They were interested in sys-
tems of government. Philosophy was for them more important
than opportunism and so they achieved in the end philosophy
rather than opportunity.” 2

Arnold professed more admiration for the tycoons who had
organized American industry and against whom the Progressives
had grown indignant than he did for the reformers themselves.
He spoke with much indulgence of Rockefeller, Carnegie, and
Ford, and compared John L. Lewis with such men as examples
of skillful organizers who had had to sidestep recognized scru-
ples. "Actual observation of human society . . . indicates that

2 The Folklore of Capitalism , p. 220.

321

Chapter vh: From Progressivism to the New Deal

great constructive achievements in human organization have
been accomplished by unscrupulous men who violated most of
the principles which we cherish/’ 3 The leaders of industrial
organization ignored legal, humanitarian, and economic princi-
ples. "They built on their mistakes, their action was opportun-
istic, they experimented with human material and with little
regard for social justice. Yet they raised the level of productive
capacity beyond the dreams of their fathers/’ 4

Not surprisingly Arnold also had a good word for the poli-
ticians, who, for all their lack of social values and for all the
imperfections in their aims and vision, are "the only persons
who understand the techniques of government.” One would
prefer a government in the hands of disinterested men, to be
sure, but such men are so devoted to and satisfied with the de-
velopment of good principles that they fail to develop skills, and
hence fail to constitute "a competent governing class.” Hence
society is too often left with a choice between demagogues and
psychopaths on one side, or, on the other, “kindly but unedu-
cated Irishmen whose human sympathies give them an instinc-
tive understanding of what people like.” 5 Several pages of The
Folklore of Capitalism were given to a defense of the political
machines for the common sense with which they attack the task
of government and for the humanitarian spirit in which their
work is conducted. 6

Taken by itself, Arnold’s work, with its skepticism about the
right-thinking citizen, its rejection of fixed moral principles and
disinterested rationality in politics, its pragmatic temper, its
worship of accomplishment, its apotheosis of organization and
institutional discipline, and its defense of the political machines,
may exaggerate the extent of the difference between the New

3 The Symbols of Government , p. 5.

4 Ibid., p. 125.

5 Ibid., pp. 21—2.

6 The Folklore of Capitalism, pp. 367-72; cf. pp. 43, 114-15; c£. The
Symbols of Government, pp. 239-40.

322

THE AGE OF REFORM

Deal and pre-war Progressivism, but it does point sharply to the
character of that difference . 7

To emphasize, as I have done, the pragmatic and “hard” side
of the New Deal is not to forget that it had its “soft” side. Not
all its spokesmen shared Arnold’s need to pose as hard-boiled . 8

7 There are many points at which Arnold yields to the need to seem
hard-boiled and at which (rather hke F. D. R. himself) he becomes flip-
pant over serious questions. While such lapses have a good deal of symp-
tomatic importance, I do not wish to appear to portray his writing as an
attack upon political morahty as such: it was not an effort to destroy
political morality, but to satirize a particular code of morahty that he con-
sidered obsolescent and obstructive, and to substitute for it a new one, the
precise outlines of which were obviously vague. In my judgment, Arnold
aid not even successfully pose, much less answer, the very real and im-
portant questions that were suggested by his books concerning the rela-
tions between morals and pohtics, or between reason and pohtics. For a
searching criticism see the essay by Sidney Hook m his Reason , Social
Myths , and Democracy (New York, 1950), pp. 41-51 and the ensuing ex-
change between Hook and Arnold, pp. 51-61, which to my mind succeeds
only m underscoring Arnold's philosophical difficulties. The great value of
Arnold's books lies not in the little they have to say about political ethics,
but m their descriptive, satirical, and analytical approach to the political
thinking of his time, and in their statement of the working mood of a great
many New Dealers.

I should perhaps add that my own comments in this area are not in-
tended to be more than descriptive, for there are large questions of political
ethics that I too have not attempted to answer. In contrasting the prag-
matic and opportunistic tone of the New Deal with the insistent moralism
of the Progressives, it has not been my purpose to suggest an invidious
comparison that would, at every point, favor the New Deal. Neither is it
my purpose to imply that the political morals of the New Dealers were in-
ferior to those of their opponents. My essential interest is in the fact that
the emergency that gave nse to the New Deal also gave rise to a trans-
valuation of values, and that the kind of moralism that I have identified
with the dominant patterns of thought among the Progressives was in-
herited not so much by their successors among the New Dealers, who
tended to repudiate them, as by the foes of the New Deal.

8 1 have been referred to David Lihenthal's TV A: Democracy on the
March (New York, 1944) as an illustration of the idealism and inspira-
tional force of the New Deal, and as a work more representative of its
spirit than the writings of Thurman Arnold. Lihenthal's book is indeed
more unabashedly humanitanan, more inspirational, more concerned with
maintaining democracy in the face of technical and administrative change,
more given to idealization of the people. It also shows, however, a dedica-
tion to certain values, readily discernible in Arnold, that would have been
of marginal importance to all but a few of the Progressives. Like Arnold,
Lihenthal is pleading the cause of organization, engineering, management.

323

Chapter vh: From Progressivism to the New Deal

No movement of such scope and power could exist without hav-
ing its ideals and its ideologies, even its sentimentalities. The
New Deal had its literature of inspiration and indignation, its
idealistic fervor, its heroes and villains. The difference I hope
to establish is that its indignation was directed far more against
callousness and waste, far less against corruption or monopoly,
than the indignation of the Progressives, and that its inspiration
was much more informed by engineering, administration, and
economics, considerably less by morals and uplift. For the New
Deal not only brought with it a heartening rediscovery of the
humane instincts of the country; it also revived the old American
interest m practical achievement, in doing things with the physi-
cal world, in the ideal that had inspired the great tycoons and
industry-builders of the Gilded Age but that afterwards had
commonly been dismissed by sensitive men as the sphere only
of philistines and money-grubbers.

At the core of the New Deal, then, was not a philosophy
(F. D. R. could identify himself philosophically only as a Chris-
tian and a democrat), but an attitude, suitable for practical
politicians, administrators, and technicians, but uncongenial to
the moralism that the Progressives had for the most part shared
with their opponents. At some distance from the center of the
New Deal, but vital to its public support, were other types of
feeling. In some quarters there was a revival of populistic senti-
ment and the old popular demonology, which F. D. R. and men
like Harold Ickes occasionally played up to, chiefly in campaign
years, and which Harry Truman later reflected in his baiting of

and the attitudes that go with them, as opposed to what he calls the “fog”
of conventional ideologies. He appeals to administrative experience, tech-
nology, science, and expertise , finds that efficient devices of management
“give a lift to the human spirit,” and asserts that “there is almost nothing,
however fantastic that (given competent organization) a team of engi-
neers, scientists, and admmistrators cannot do today.” ( Pocket Book ed ,
New York, 1945, pp. ix, x, 3, 4, 8, 9, 79, 115.) In the light of this philos-
ophy it is easier to see that Lihenthal’s more recent defense of big business
does not represent a conversion to a new philosophy but simply an ability
to find m private orgamzation many of the same virtues that as TVA ad-
ministrator he found in public enterprise.

324

THE AGE OF REFORM

Wall Street. Along with, this came another New Deal phenome-
non, a kind of pervasive tenderness for the underdog, for the
Okies, the sharecroppers, the characters in John Steinbeck's
novels, the subjects who posed for the FSA photographers, for
what were called, until a revulsion set in, "the little people."
With this there came, too, a kind of folkish nationalism, quick-
ened no doubt by federal patronage of letters and the arts, but
inspired at bottom by a real rediscovery of hope in America and
its people and institutions. For after the concentration camps,
the Nuremberg Laws, Guernica, and (though not everyone saw
this so readily) the Moscow trials, everything in America
seemed fresh and hopeful, Main Street seemed innocent beyond
all expectation, and in time Babbitt became almost lovable.
Where Progressivism had capitalized on a growing sense of the
ugliness under the successful surface of American life, the New
Deal flourished on a sense of the human warmth and the techno-
logical potentialities that could be found under the surface of its
inequities and its post-depression poverty. On the far fringe
there was also a small number of real ideologues, aroused not
only by the battle over domestic reform but by the rise of world
fascism. Although many of them were fellow travelers and Com-
munists, we stand in serious danger of misunderstanding the
character of the New Deal if we overemphasize the influence of
this fringe either upon the New Deal core or upon the American
people at large. It has now become both fashionable and, for
some, convenient to exaggerate the impact of the extreme left
upon the thinking of the country in the 1930's. No doubt it will
always be possible to do so, for Marxism had a strong if ephem-
eral impact upon many intellectuals; but the amateur Marxism
of the period had only a marginal effect upon the thought and
action of either the administrative core of the New Deal or the
great masses of Americans. 9 For the people at large — that is,

9 Granville Hicks, m his Where We Came Out (New York, 1954),
chapter iv, makes a sober effort to show how hmited was the Communist
influence even m those circles which were its special province. A comple-

325

Chapter vn: From Progressivism to the New Deal

for those who needed it most — the strength of the New Deal
was based above all upon its ability to get results.

The New Deal developed from the beginning under the
shadow of totalitarianism, left and right. F. D. R. and Hitler
took office within a few months of each other, and from that
time down to the last phases of the New Deal reforms, not a
year went by without some premonition of the ultimate horror
to come. In the earliest days of the Roosevelt administration a
great many of its critics, influenced by such models of catastro-
phe as they could find abroad, saw in it the beginnings of fas-
cism or Communism. Critics from the left thought, for instance,
that the NRA was a clear imitation of Mussolini's corporate
state. And — though this is now all but forgotten — critics from
the right at first thought they saw fascist tendencies in the “vio-
lations” of fundamental liberties with which they regularly
charged the architects of the New Deal. Only later did they
find it more congenial to accuse the New Deal of fostering Com-
munism.

To a sober mind all of this rings false today, for it is easier to
see now that Roosevelt and his supporters were attempting to
deal with the problems of the American economy within the
distinctive framework of American political methods — that in a
certain sense they were trying to continue to repudiate the
European world of ideology. Between the London Economic
Conference and Roosevelt's “quarantine” speech of 1937, the
New Deal, for all its tariff-reduction agreements, was essentially

mentary error to the now fashionable exaggeration of the Communist in-
fluence is to exaggerate its ties to the New Deal. Of course Communists
played an active part m the spurt of labor organization until the experi-
enced labor leaders expelled them, and in time Communists also succeeded
in infiltrating the bureaucracy, with what shocking results we now know.
But it was the depression that began to put American Communism on its
feet and the New Deal that helped to kill it. The Commumsts, as con-
sistent ideologues, were always contemptuous of the New Deal. At first
they saw fascism in it, and when they gave up this hne of criticism during
the Popular Front period, they remained contemptuous of its frank ex-
perimentalising its lack of direction, its unsystematic character, and of
course its compromises.

326

THE AGE OF REFORM

isolationist. What it could not escape was the reality of what
even some of the Republican leaders later began to characterize
as “one world." After 1939 that reality was the dominant force
in American life. The beginning of the war meant that Ameri-
cans, with terrible finality, had been at last torn from that ha-
bitual security in which their domestic life was merely inter-
rupted by crises in the foreign world, and thrust into a situation
in which their domestic life is largely determined by the de-
mands of foreign policy and national defense. With this change
came the final involvement of the nation in all the realities it had
sought to avoid, for now it was not only mechanized and urban-
ized and bureaucratized but internationalized as well. Much of
America still longs for — indeed, expects again to see — a return
of the older individualism and the older isolation, and grows
frantic when it finds that even our conservative leaders are un-
able to restore such conditions. In truth we may well sympathize
with the Populists and with those who have shared their need
to believe that somewhere in the American past there was a
golden age whose life was far better than our own. But actually
to live in that world, actually to enjoy its cherished promise and
its imagined innocence, is no longer within our power.

((( 327 )))

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

$

first efforts to set down my ideas on these subjects
were elicited by an invitation from the Charles R. Walgreen
Foundation. I am obliged to Professor Jerome Kerwin, Director
of the Walgreen lectures, and to a number of his colleagues at
the University of Chicago for making the occasion of the original
lectures a pleasant one. My first six chapters are revised and
expanded versions of those lectures. A somewhat different ver-
sion was delivered as the Commonwealth Fund Lectures at
University College, London, in January and February 1955.

For this volume and other work in progress the Behavioral
Sciences Division of the Ford Foundation placed at my disposal
a generous grant that has enabled me to examine many more
facets of the history of Populism and Progressivism than I could
otherwise have considered and to complete the work much
sooner than I could otherwise have done.

Thanks are due above all to my wife, Beatrice Kevitt Hof-
stadter, who has developed the art of the editor and the textual
critic into a major gift for asking the right questions. Her advice
has been indispensable. Peter Gay gave hours beyond number to
a searching criticism of the manuscript and to exploring its
argument with me; his generosity with his time was equaled
only by his genial severity with my lapses. Fritz Stern, after
reading the manuscript, went through the galleys meticulously,
to my inestimable benefit.

For advice in revision I am deeply obliged to many friends.
William Leuchtenburg, Seymour M. Lipset, Walter P. Metzger,
C. Wright Mills, David Riesman, and Kenneth M. Stampp went
through the manuscript and provided me, section by section and

328

THE AGE OF REFORM

chapter by chapter, with voluminous and detailed criticisms and
suggestions that caused me to make many serious modifications,
to eliminate some misstatements and overstatements, and to add
several observations that brought out more satisfactorily than
my own draft some of the implications of its ideas — after which
I was still in possession of a fund of unused comments and
questions whose pursuit might yield another book. The manu-
script was similarly read with care, in whole or in large part,
by Daniel Aaron, Stanley Elkins, Frank Freidel, Henry Graff,
Alfred A. Knopf, Henry F. May, William Miller, Henry Nash
Smith, Harold Strauss, Harold Syrett, David B. Truman, and
C. Vann Woodward, all of whom made valuable comments
that led to important changes. Lee Benson and Eric Lampard
gave me much needed advice on Populism and the history
of American agriculture, and gave me cause to hope that
some specialists in this field might be more indulgent than I at
first had any reason to expect with the rather broad generaliza-
tions I have made about the refractory details of economic his-
tory. The research assistants who successively served this in-
quiry, Paul Carter, Gurston Goldin, Eric McKitrick, and James
Shenton, gave to it an informed, imaginative, and affectionate
attention that went beyond the call of their assignments. I am
indebted in particular to conversations with Mr. McKitrick for
some of the formulations in chapter v, to Mr. Shenton for some
of those in chapter vi.

INDEX

Aaron, Darnel, 90 n, 92 n, 328
academic profession, 152-5, Dewey
on, 154 n

Adams, Brooks, 81, 88, 91, 92, 316
Adams, Charles F , Jr , 139 n,
185-6, quoted, 58 n
Adams, Henry: prejudices of, 78,
81, 91, 140; on New England so-
ciety, 136; muckraking activities
of, 185-6, quoted, 136
Adams, John, 14
Addams, Jane, 208, 272
Ade, George, 289 n
advertisers, and editorial policy, 194
agrarian myth . m the nineteenth
century, 23-59, Populism and,
62-4, attitude toward govern-
ment in, 96-7, in the twentieth
century, 121

agrarian organization, 47, 49-50,
96-8, 111-20. See also Popuhsm
agrarian revolt, failure of, 94-6
Agricultural Adjustment Adminis-
tration (AAA), 304 n, 310 n
“agricultural fundamentalism,” 31
agriculture: Bryan on, 35, com-
mercialization of, 38-43, 109-13;
comparison of American and
European, 43-6, and theories of
frontier, 48-58, world crisis in,
50-2; and apphed science, 51,
114; and settling of land, 52-8;
prosperity of, 95, city as market
for, 100, effect of diversification,
100 n, and agricultural education,
114, 117 n, 118, 124-5; parity,
119, attitudes in commercialized
farming, 123-30. See also agrar-
ian myth and farmers
Alberta, 53

Albion, Robert G , 51 n
Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 172, 177 n
Allen, Frederick Lewis, 284

Altgeld, John P., 145, 165
Amalgamated Copper, 169
American Association of Umversity
Professors, 155

American Bankers' Association, 124
American Bimetallic League, 75,
106

American Capitalism (Galbraith),
313

American Federation of Labor, 99,
169-70

American Magazine , 195, 196 n
American Mercury, 286
American Railway Union, 150,

221 n

American Revolution, 10, 28, 227
American Smelting and Refining
Company, 169

American Society of Equity, 111,
112 n, 116 n, 126

American Tobacco Company, 249 n
Anglophobia, 76-9, 81, 271
Anglo-Saxons, see Yankee tradition
anthracite strike, 233. See also
strike

anti-Cathohcism, 286, 292, 294, 298
anti-imperialism, 85-6, 90-1, 271-2
Anti-Masonic Party, 98
anti-Masonic movements, 72, 98
anti-militarism, see pacifism
Anti-Saloon League, 288, 290
anti-Semitism, 61, 73 n, 77-81, 91,
286, 292

anti-trust action- history of, 225-52;
New Deal attitude toward, 249 n,
253, 311-4, 310-21; effect of,
253-4

Antitrust Division of the Depart-
ment of Justice, 245, 249
Appeal to Reason , Socialist journal,
239 n

architects, 153 n
Argentina, 51

INDEX

ii

Arkansas, 103
Armstrong Committee, 219
Arnold, Thurman, 249 n, 253, 312,
317-22; quoted, 253, 312, 318-9,
320-1

Atkinson, Edward, 139 n
Atlantic , 190
Austin, A. L. D., 103 n
Australia, 51

authority, American distrust of,
226-7

Autobiography of William Allen
White , quoted, 131-2

Baghdigian, Bagdasar K., 180 n
Bailey, Joseph C , 125 n
Baker, O. E., 114 n
Baker, Ray Stannard, 193, 201,
quoted, 195, 202 n, 205-6 n, 214
ballot: short, 255, 263-4, 266 n;

secret, 256
Baltimore, 176
Banker-Farmer , 124
bankers: distrust of, 75-8, 90-1,
228, and fanners, 124-5; new
status of, 151; and editorial pol-
icy, 194; and Wilson, 251
Bank of England, 76
banks, investment, see investment
houses

Bar Associations, 157, 159
Bardolph, Richard, 32 n
Barnes, James A., 65 n, 89 n, 107 n
Barr, Elizabeth N., 52 n, 64 n, 101 n
Baruch, Bernard, 304 n; quoted,
31-2

Beale, Howard K., 199 n
Bean, Walton, 239 n
Beard, Charles A., 154, 198, 202 n,
309 n

Beard, Mary R., 309 n
Bell, Daniel, 81 n, 217 n
Bellamy, Edward, 67
Bemis, Edward, 178
Bendix, Reinhard, 138 n, 153 n
Bennett, James Gordon, 188
Benson, Lee, 51 n, 52 n, 99 n, 164 n,
328

Bentley, Arthur F., 56 n, 58 n, 154,
198, 202 n; quoted, 55-6 j

j Berle, A. A., 161-2, 162 n, 218 n
I Bettelheim, Bruno, 153 n
Beveridge, Albert J., 91
Bidwell, P. W., 33 n, 39 n, 41 n
Billmgton, Ray Allen, 65 n, 86 n
bimetallism, 85 n
Bmgham, Theodore A., 202 n
Birkbeck, Morris, quoted, 41
Black, John D., 119 n, 120 n, 169 n
Blame, James G., 139
Blair, William M , 129 n
Blaisdell, Donald, 118 n
Blake, Nelson M , 89 n
Blease, Cole, 20
Bliss, W. D P., 141 n
Blum, John Morton, 245 n
Bly, Nelly, 188
Bocock, John Paul, 177 n
Bogue, Allan G., 56 n
Bohemians, 44
Boiler, Paul, Jr., 72 n
Boorstin, Darnel J., 277 n, 278 n
Boots, Ralph S., 266 n
Borah, William E., 283
Borsodi, R., 114 n

boss, political, and immigrants, 9,
176, 180-4; and Yankee tradition,
10, and Progressivism, 10, 134,
255, 263-6; nse to power, 174;
Steffens on, 206; and New Deal,
308

Boston, 139, 176, 177 n
Bowers, Lloyd W , 160 n
Boyesen, H. H , 141, 208
Brackenridge, Hugh Henry, 26
brain trust, of Progressivism, 154^5,
178

Brandeis, Elizabeth, 165 n
Brandeis, Louis D.: on lawyers,
160-1, 163, 262; and tariff,

171-2; view of business, 211-2 n,
222, 246, 248, 252-3, 313-4, 316;
on investment, 219, 230 n; and
Federal Trade Commission, 250;
quoted, 160-1, 163, 211-2 n, 219,
250, 262; and New Deal, 313-4,
316

Brebner, J. Bartlet, 53 n
Bristol, George W., quoted, 160
Browne, Porter Emerson, 275 n

INDEX

iii

Bruce, H. Addington, 290 n
Brunner, Edmund de S , 44 n
Bryan, William Jennmgs: and elec-
tion of 1896, 3, 49-50, 100, 165 n,
on cities and farms, 35, m litera-
ture, 60, 275 n; and silver ques-
tion, 65, 106-7, on money, 66,
disavowal of anti-Semitism, 80,
and Klan, 81, anti-imperial-
ism of, 85-6, and agriculture,
94-5; and Populism, 94-5, 132,
attitude of middle class toward,
132, 250; and Progressivism, 167,
and competition, 246, on judg-
ment of the people, 260, pacifism
of, 271-2, and Prohibition, 277 n,
287, 288; decline of, 286-7;
quoted, 35, 65, 66, 80, 260, 277 n
Bryce, Lord, 73 n, quoted, 142, 160,
175, 205

Buck, Solon J., 96 n
Buel, Jesse, quoted, 33
Bull Moose movement, 132, 177 n,
301. See also Progressivism
Bull Moose Party, see Progressive
Party

Bundy, McGeorge, 163 n
Bureau of Agricultural Economics,
112

Bureau of Corporations, 245
Burr, Aaron, 213

business, big Progressive attitude
toward, 5, 134, 163-72, 212-54;
agrarian attitude toward, 64-81;
rise of, 136-8, 168-9, 213,

229-30; Mugwump attitude to-
ward, 139-45, in journalism and
literature, 141-2, 200-12, 284 n,
and the status revolution, 146-63,
lawyers of, 158-63, city as market
for, 173, and muckraking, 191-6,
211-2; and small investments,
218, officers and stockholders,
219-21; investigations of, 220,
230, 311; and democratic govern-
ment, 225-36; Wilson on, 231; re-
forms in, 240-2; gradations of,
245, 248-9; approval of, 246-7,
283; New Deal attitude toward,

business, big ( continued )

254, 310-4. See also anti-trust
action and businessmen
businessmen: and reform parties, 4;
and conservatism, 12; and farm-
ers, 124-5; new wealthy group,
136-8, 140-1, 145-8; new status
of, 151, opposition to muckrak-
ing, 194-5, program of Progres-
sivism for, 236, and Wilson, 251;
criticism of by intellectuals, 285;
Arnold on, 320-1 See also wealth
business schools, 241
Butler, Ed, 182 n
Butterfield, Roger, 31 n

Cabinet, 162

Caesars Column (Donnelly), 67-
70, 84, 86; quoted, 68
Calhoun, John, 140
California, 116, 145, 268 n
Call to Action , A (Weaver), 63
Calvinism, 40
Canada, 51, 53, 120 n
canals, 38

Cantwell, Robert, quoted, 197-8

capitalism, private welfare, 241-2

Capper- Volstead Act, 113

Caribbean, 272

Carnegie, Andrew, 320

Carter, Paul, 328

Case, Robert Ormond, 127 n

Case, Victoria, 127 n

Catholic Church, 16, 204 n, 296-9

Cathohcs, 286, 292, 294, 298

Cato, 25

cattle farming, 38, 100
Census Bureau, 136
Century, 190

Chandler, Albert D., quoted, 144-5
Charles R. Walgreen Foundation,
327

Chautauquas, 127
Chew, Arthur P., 118
Chicago, 82, 139 n, 173, 176
Chicago, University of, 327
child labor, 240, 281
Child Labor Committee, 258
China, 272

IV

INDEX

Christian social gospel: reform, 152,
198, pacifism, 271-2 See also
Protestant tradition
Churchill, Winston, Progressive nov-
elist, 208 n
Cicero, 25

city agrarian attitude toward, 32-5,
82, 108-11, 122, 286-7, Bryan
on, 35; growth of, 109-11, 173-5,
and pohtics, 114-5, 296-9, and
rural legislatures, 116-7, and Pro-
gressivism, 131, 134; and rural
migrants, 175, 187. See also gov-
ernment, municipal
civil liberties, 267

Civil War: fiscal legislation during,
76 n, farm legislation during,
117 n

Clark, Gordon, 75, 76 n, 79 n
Clay, Henry, 140
Clayton Anti-Trust Act, 113, 249
Clemenceau, Georges, 278
Clergy, 149-53
Cleveland, 173, 176
Cleveland, Grover: Populist attitude
toward, 79, 96, and Venezuela af-
fair, 89; conservatism of, 96, 233;
and silver, 104, election of 1884,
139, on tariff, 142; and Pullman
strike, 233; quoted, 142
Clough, Shepard B., 219 n
Cohen, Julius Henry, 1 60 n
Coin’s Financial School (Harvey),
76-7, 78, 84; quoted, 80
collective bargaining, 281, 306
Colliers, 237
colonialism, 271

“Coming Billionaire, The” (Shear-
man), 136

commission government, 255, 265 n,
266 n

Commission on Country Life, quoted,
109

Committee on Agricultural Devel-
opment and Education, 124
Committee on Public Information,
273

Commons, John R., 154, 165 n, 178,
240 n

Commonwealth Fund Lectures, 327

communications, improvements m,
51, 57, 169
Communism, 324-5
Communist Party, 16
competition, decline of, 10; Mug-
wump view of, 142-3, Progres-
sive view of, 236, 242, 246, 303;
“free” and “illicit,” 248, unfair,
249

Condliffe, J B , 86 n
Confessions of a Reformer , The
(Howe), 284, quoted, 204-5
Connecticut, 116

Connelley, Wilham E., 52 n, 64 n,
101 n

conservatism : as a national trait,
12-14, 204; m major parties, 100;
and immigrants, 177; and new
realism, 199, and growth of cor-
porations, 221-3, and T Roose-
velt, 234, and reform, 238, 262-4;
ascendancy of, 250-1, and Prohi-
bition, 287 n, during New Deal,
315-6, Arnold on, 318-21
Consolidated Tobacco, 169
conspiratorial manias, 16, 70-93,
228-36, 232

Constitution, 28, 199, 227, 290
consumers, 133, 170-2, 236, 285 n,
312

Consumed League, 258
Cooke, Jay, 218

Coolidge, Calvin, 31, 118-9, 282 n,
296 n, quoted, 31
Coolidge, L A , 202 n, 243 n
co-operatives, farm, 113, 127 n
Corey, Lewis, 216 n
Cornell Countryman , 126
Cornell University, 158
com-hog farming, 100, 100 n, 110
corporations, see busmess, big
Cosmopolitan, 193, 237
cost of living, 168-70
cotton, 38, 50, 52 n, 100, 110
Cotton Futures Act, 118
Coughlin, Charles Edward, 81
Cox, James M , 296 n, 299
Cox, La Wanda F., 121 n
Coxey s Army, 165

INDEX

v

Crane, Charles R., 144
Crane, Stephen, 197
Credit Mobilier, 71
“credit-strengthening act” ( March
18, 1869), 76
Creel, George, 273
Crevecoeur, Hector St. Jean de, 23,
26; quoted, 36

Croly, Herbert, 6, 244, 245 n, 246,
251, 266 n, 301, 316, quoted,
264-5

Cronau, Rudolph, 209 n
Cuba, 84, 89-91, 271
Cummins, Albert Baird, quoted,
261

Czechs, 176

dairying, 100, 112
Daniels, Josephus, 288
Darwinism, social, 149
Daugherty, Harry, 282 n
David, Phihp, 181 n
Davis, John W., 282 n, 296 n
Davis, Joseph S., quoted, 31
Debs, Eugene V., 98, 165, 221 n,
238 n, 280

Demaree, Albert J., 32 n
democracy: grass roots, 4, 17, Pop-
ulism and, 4, 18, 40, 47-50, 58-9,
61-7, 96-108, 132; Progressivism
and, 6, 18, 132-4, 163-84,

236-69; national characteristics
of, 7-9, 16-22, New Deal and,
11, 18, 301, 308, Jacksonian, 18,
40, 63^4, 152; Jeffersonian, 18,
152, 270, 271; Mugwumps and,
135-45; intellectuals and, 148-63;
immigrants and, 176-85; big
business and, 225-36, W. A.
White on, 258; Croly on, 264;
mass, 268, and nationalism,
270-1

Democratic Party: and Populism,
4r-5 , 96; and Progressivism, 89,
133, 295-300, and silver, 104,
106, and immigrants, 178 n, 295-
300; Stimson on, 262; and labor,
299

Denver, 146

Department of Agriculture, 112,
113, 117 n, 118, 118 n, 125, 126
Department of Justice, 245
depression, of 1873, 150, of 1893,
104, 166; of 1913, 251; Great, 4,
85 n, 300, 305 n, 310
“Deserted Village, The” ( Gold-
smith), 26

Destler, Chester McA., 99 n, 100 n,
107 n

Detroit, 173

Dewey, John, 154, 199; quoted,
154 n

Diamond, William, 247 n
Dies, Martin, 20
Dmgley tariff, 171
diplomacy, see foreign pokey
direct primaries, 255-6, 261-2,

264 n, 265, 266 n, 319
Donnelly, Ignatius: Populist novel
of, 67-70, 73 n, 79, 231; as Pop-
ulist leader, 74, 103; papers of,
101-2 n; quoted, 68, 74
Donnelly, Thomas, 282 n, 298 n
Dooley, Mr. (Dunne), quoted, 21
Dos Passos, John, 284
Dos Passos, John R., 160 n
Douglas, Paul H., 117 n, 169 n
Douglas, Stephen A., 72
Dreiser, Theodore, 190, 197;
quoted, 190 n

East, 32, rural culture in, 43; Pop-
ulism m, 99; Progressivism in,
133, 163; dispossession of old
ehte, 137, immigrants in, 176
Economic Interpretation of the Con-
stitution of the United States
(Beard), 199

economic reform, see democracy,
Popuhsm, Progressivism, New
Deal

Edwards, Everett E., 39 n
Edwards, George W., 77
Egbert, Donald Drew, 217 n
Eggleston, Edward, 197
Eggleston, George Cary, 67
Eismger, Chester E., 26 n, 28 n
election: of 1872, 139; of 1880,
109 n; of 1884, 109 n, 139, of

INDEX

vi

election ( continued )

1888, 109 n, of 1892, 96, 98, 100,
of 1894, 100, 109 n; of 1896, 3,
63, 79, 94-5, 164, 165 n, of 1900,
238 n, of 1904, 238 n; of 1908,
238 n; of 1912, 98, 133, 177 n,
238 n, 247, 248, 281, 282 n, 295;
of 1920, 295; of 1924, 98, 115,
281, 281-2 n, 296, 297; of 1928,
282 n, 298, 299, of 1932, 298; of
1936, 296 n; of 1940, 282 n
Eliot, Charles William, 229, quoted,
229-30 n

elite, see Mugwumps
Elkins, Stanley, 213 n, 328
Ellis, Elmer, 107 n
Elsworth, E. H., 113
Ely, Richard T., 154, 155
Emergency Price Control Act, 119
Emenck, C. F., 51 n
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 28 n
Emery, Mrs. S. E V., 62 n, 73 n,
75 n, 76 n; quoted, 75-6
England, 25, 26, 51, 242, 270; in
Populist thought, 76-9, 85, 88-9
English, 176

Europe, 43-6, 86-7, 241. See also
immigrants and immigration
Evans, Hiram Wesley, quoted,
293-4

Everett, Edward, 140

Everett, William, 139 n

Eventt, J. A., 112 n; quoted, 126 n

“ever normal granary” idea, 112

“exception clause” (1862), 76 n

Fabians, 238

Falconer, John I, 33 n, 39 n, 41 n
Far East, 272

Farm Bloc, 118-9, 123, 283
Farm Bureau Federation, 124, 126,
128

“Farmer as a Merchant, The,” 126
farmers: and reform parties, 4; and
political democracy, 7, as a spe-
cial-interest group, 7-8, 115-30,
283, early history, 23-38; govern-
ment aid to, 29, 38, 53-5, 117 n,
118-9; and commercial revolu-
tion, 36-59, 121; and foreign pol-

farmers ( continued )

icy, 38, mobility among, 42-4; in
South, 47, “soft” (agrarian) and
“hard” ( commercial ) sides of, 47,
95, 120; orgamzing activity of,
47, 52, 96, 102, 107; mortgage
indebtedness of, 50, 55-7, 99;
grievances of, 58, 281-3; and
railroads, 58; and labor, 64,
121-2, failure of their revolt,
9^6, Eastern and Western, 99;
and the city, 108-11, 122, 175,
187, 286-7, prosperity of, 109-11;
marketing and purchasing organi-
zations, 113, change from third-
party action, 115, decline in num-
bers, 116-7; marginal, 128, stere-
otypes of, 128-9, increase m num-
ber, 215, Progressive programs
for, 236, 281, criticism of, 285.
See also agrarian myth, agricul-
ture, Populism

Farmers* Alliance, 47, 96, 102, 127
Farmers* Union, 111, 112, 116 n,
122 n, 123

farming, see agriculture
farm machinery, 38-9, 45
Farm Security Administration, 124
fascism, 325

Faulkner, Harold U., 170 n
Federal Farm Loan Act, 118
Federalist , 64
Federalists, 28
Federal Reserve System, 252
Federal Trade Commission, 249,
250, 283

Ferns, Daniel M., 99 n
Fels, Joseph, 145
Filene, Edward A., 144, 241
Filler, Louis, 193, 194 n
finance capital, see investment
houses

first World War, see World War,
first

fiscal policy: Populism and, 66,
74-7; during and after Civil War,
76 n, 88, 104, of New Deal,
307-8. See also silver question
Fish, E. W., 67 n
Fite, Gilbert C., 116 n

INDEX

vii

Fitzpatrick, F. W., 153 n
Florida, 52, 103
Flower, Edward, 80 n
Flynt, Josiah, 205 n
Folk, Joseph, 182 n
Folklore of Capitalism , The (Ar-
nold), 253, 317, 319-21
Forbes, Allyn B., 67 n
Ford Foundation, 327
Ford, Henry, 81, 320
Ford, Paul L , 25 n
foreign bom, see immigrants
foreign policy, influence of farmers
on, 38, Wilson and, 229; and war,
270-9; "dollar diplomacy,” 272,
and election of 1940, 282 n; and
isolationism, 325-6
foreign trade: and agriculture, 50,
100, 110; and communications
revolution, 51. See also tariff
Forum , 136, 175 n
Foundmg Fathers, 140, 199
France, 25, 51
franchises, bartering of, 174
Frank, Leo, 81

Franklin, Benjamin, 26 n; quoted,
27

Frazier, Lynn, 20
Frederic, Harold, 197
free enterprise, 226. See also laissez
faire

free land, see frontier

Free-Soil Party, 98

Freidel, Frank, 304 n, 328

Freneau, Philip, 26

Frenzied Finance (Lawson), 193

Frick, Henry Clay, 251

Friedman, I. K., 208 n

frontier, in American history, 48-51

Frost, Stanley, 295 n

Fuller, Henry Blake, 141, 166

Galbraith, John Kenneth, 313,
quoted, 313 n, 314
Garland, Hamlin, 30 n, 52 n, 186,
197; quoted, 82
Gary, Elbert H., 193
Gates, Paul Wallace, 54 n
Gaus, John M., 112 n, 118 n

Gaw, Walter A., 194 n
Gay, Peter, 327
Gee, Wilson, 37 n, 46 n
Georgia, 49, 103
Germans, 43-4, 176
Germany, 51, 254, 275
Ghent, W. J., 238 n, 316
Gibbons, James Cardinal, 67
Gilded Age, 140, 142, 232, 323
Godkin, E. L., 142
gold, 16, 74-5, 110, 186
Golden Battle , The (Donnelly),
86-7

Goldin, Gurston, 328
Goldman, Enc, quoted, 15
Goldsmith, Oliver, 26
Gompers, Samuel, 178 n
Goode, James B., 78 n
Goodnow, Frank J., 202 n
government, federal: aid to farmers
by, 29, 38, 53-5, 117 n, 118-9;
foreign policy, 38, 229, 282 n,
290-9, 325-6; fiscal policy, 76 n,
88-104, 307-8; and public own-
ership, 97, 105, 281, 304; Pro-
gressive attitude toward, 133,
227, 231-6, 260-1, 303-4; and
regulation of business, 164-5,
220-54; attitude of immigrants
toward, 181-4; action by sought,
231-6, 250-4, under the Roose-
velts, 305, New Deal attitude to-
ward, 306-9

state: control of by rural ele-
ments, 116-7; and regulation of
business, 164-5, 229, 231, 252;
and social welfare legislation, 240
municipal: city reform organi-
zations, 164, Lord Bryce on, 175;
and muckraking, 185-6, 206-9,
city-manager plan and municipal
ownership, 266 n
Graff, Henry, 328
Graham, George A., 117 n
Grain Standards Act, 118
Granger movement, 4, 46, 49 n, 96,
127

Greenback movement, 4, 75, 100 n
Greenbaum, Joseph, 153 n

viii

INDEX

Greenslet, Ferris, 177 n
Gregory, Frances W., 140
Grimes, Alan P., 142 n ? 143 n
Griswold, A. Whitney, 25 n, 28 n,
29 n, 37 n, 119 n; quoted 120
Grosscup, Peter S., 221-2
guilt, personal, see responsibility,
sense of

Gulick, Charles A., 169 n
Guterman, Norbert, 72 n, 73 n

Hacker, Louis, quoted, 94
Hague, Frank, 265 n, 308
Haiti, 84

Hamilton, Alexander, quoted, 27
Hamilton, Walton, 249 n
Hammond, Bray, 58 n
Hamptons , 191, 194
Handlin, Oscar, 78 n, 81 n, 181 n
Hanna, Mark, 100, 109, 135, 164,
234-5, 271

Hansen, Marcus, 53 n; quoted, 43-4
Harding, Warren G., 296 n
Harlan, John Marshall, quoted,

249 n

Harper’s Weekly , 186, 190
Harnman, E. H., 235
Hartford, Conn., 116
Hartmann, Edward G., 179 n, 180 n
Harvey, William Hope (“Coin 7 ),
73 n, 81, 85 n, 86 n; quoted, 76,
77, 78 n

Hatch Act, 118 n
Hawaii, 84

Hawgood, John A., 44 n
Hawthorne, Julian, 67
Hay, John, 91, 164
Hayes, Rutherford B., 233
Haynes, Fred E., 107 n
Hearst, William Randolph, 21, 191
Heath, B. S., 63 n, quoted, 65 n
Hechler, Kenneth, 132 n, 172 n
Hendnck, Burton J., 202 n, 211 n,
219

Hepburn Act, 118, 252
Herrick, Christine T., 171 n
Herrick, Robert, 141
Hesiod, 25

Hibbard, Benjamin H , 41 n, 53 n

Hicks, Granville, 324 n
Hicks, John, 57 n, 97 n, 101 n,
107 n, 112 n, 113 n, 115 n, 122 n,
125-7 n, quoted, 49, 94
Higgmson, Francis L., 251
Higgmson, Thomas Wentworth,

139 n

Higham, John, 177 n, 178 n
Hill, James J , 235
history, economic interpretation of,
198-9

Hitler, Adolf, 325

Hofstadter, Beatrice Kevitt, 167 n,
208 n, 327

Hofstadter, Richard, 58 n, 64 n,
90 n, 153 n, 167 n, 199 n, 208 n
Holcombe, Arthur N , 97 n
Homestead Act, 29, 53-5, 117 n
Homestead strike, 165, 242
Hook, Sidney, 322
Hoover, Herbert, 282, 298, 304-5,
305 n

Horace, quoted, 25-6
Horatio Alger legend, 216
House, Edward M , 251
House of Representatives, represen-
tation in, 116
housing, 306

Houston, David F., 112, quoted,
53 n

Howe, Frederick C , 170 n, 174 n,
284; quoted, 204-5
Howells, William Dean, 141, 197,
214 n; quoted, 200, 214
Hoyles, Newman W., 160
Hughes, Charles Evans, 158, 211
Hughes, Helen MacGill, 187 n
Hungarians, 176
Hunter, Robert, 238 n
Hurst, Willard, 160 n, 162 n

Ickes, Harold, 323
Idaho, 104

Idaho Farmer , quoted, 129
If Christ Came to Chicago (Stead),
186

Illinois, 39, 41, 98, 99, 100
immigrants: and Progressivism, 8-9,
134, 180-4; and politics, 9,

180-4, 296-9; fanners among,

INDEX

ix

immigrants ( continued )

43, and the city, 174-84, feeling
against, 177-80, 292
immigration: swelling of, 8, 44,
175-6; restriction of, 296-7
imperialism, 271-2, 277
income tax, 108, 118
Indiana, 39

individualism: ideal of Progressiv-
lsm, 5-7, 227, 258-9, and organi-
zation in industrial society,
213-69; and political reform, 257.
See also Mugwumps and Yankee
tradition

Industrial Revolution, 57, 136. See
also under agriculture and busi-
ness, big

initiative, political reform, 108, 255,
259, 265-6

insurance, life: investigation of com-
panies, 211, 219; investments in,
219

intellectuals, retreat of, 284-6. See
also status revolution and liberal-
ism

Interchurch World Movement,

151 n

interest, special, see business, big
and pressure group
interlocking directorates, 230, 239.

See also investment houses
International Mercantile Marine
Company, 169

International Socialist Review , 217 n
Interstate Commerce Act, 164, 231
investment houses, 158-63, 229,
239, 246, 251
Iowa, 98-100, 101 n, 103
Irish, 176, 177, 177 n, 182 n
isolationism, 20, 326
Italians, 176
Italy, 51

Jackson, Andrew, 4, 227, 301 n,
302-3, quoted, 260
James, Marquis, 219 n
Janowitz, Morris, 153 n
Jefferson, Thomas, 23, 26, 37, 72,
301 n, 302-3, quoted, 25, 27, 29
Jeffersonians, 28-9

Jenkins, Thomas P., quoted, 306-7 n
Jessup, Henry Wynans, 160 n
Jevons, William Stanley, 85 n
Jews, 61, 73 n, 77-81, 286, 292
jingoism, 87-93, 270
Johns Hopkins University, 205
Johnson, Andrew, 79
Johnson, Hiram, 268 n; quoted,
282-3

Johnson, Hugh, 304 n
Johnson, Samuel, quoted, 26
Johnson, Tom, 145
Johnson, Walter, 196 n
Johnstone, Paul H., 26 n, 39 n, 40 n,
101 n, 121 n, 126 n, 129 n
Jones, Samuel, 145
Jorgensen, Lloyd P., 53 n
Josephson, Matthew, 92 n, 251 n
journalism : yellow, 81, 178-9, 188,
busmess and, 142, 284 n; muck-
raking in, 185-212, college grad-
uates in, 189; and advertisers,
194, as reahstic influence, 196-7,
201-2, 206-7
judicial review, 309
Jungle , The (Sinclair), 200

Kahn, Otto H., 251
Kales, Albert M., 160 n
Kandel, I. L., 114 n
Kansas, 49, 50, 56-7, 75, 101, 104,
132

Katz, Joseph, 159 n

Kennan, George, 211, 211 n, 316

Kennan, George F., 211 n, 272 n

Kent, William, 144

Kentucky, 103

Kerwm, Jerome, 327

Keynes, J. M., quoted, 307

Kile, Orville M , 103 n, 127 n

Kipling, Rudyard, 177 n

Kipms, Ira, 179 n

Kirkland, Edward, 197

Kirwan, Albert D., 19

Knapp, Seaman A., 124

Kmghts of Labor, 99, 121

Knoles, George H., 65 n

Knopf, Alfred A , 328

Know-Nothing movement, 72

Ku Klux Klan, 81, 286, 291-5, 297

X

INDEX

labor: as a special interest, 11, 134;
political programs of, 99 n; and
Popubsm, 64, 121-2; and Pro-
gressivism, 134, 236, 239-42; or-
ganization of, 168, 213, and im-
migrants, 178; growth of working
class, 215, legislative aid to, 240,
and Democratic Party, 299; and
New Deal, 306. See also labor
unions

labor unions: early history of, 99,
121-2, 169-70; effect on business,
240-2; opposition to business wel-
fare programs, 241; acceptance
of, 242; and politics, 268
Ladies' Home Journal , 191
La Follette, Robert M.: and elec-
tion of 1924, 98, 281, 296, 296 n;
Wisconsin regime of, 155, 178,
and Progressivism, 167, on busi-
ness, 230; and competition, 246,
on anti-trust legislation, 247; and
conservatism, 250, and direct pri-
mary, 264 n; as a machine-master,
267, 268 n; pacifism of, 272-3, on
alliances, 279 n, supporters of,
281-2, quoted, 230, 247, 279 n
La Guardia, Fiorello, 268 n
laissez faire , 97, 142, 143, 149, 167
Lampard, Eric, 328
land, settlement of, in West, 45-59
land companies, 43
land-grant colleges, 114, 118 n
Landis, Kenesaw Mountain, 221
Landon, Alfred M., 296 n
Langdell, Christopher C , 157
Larson, Henrietta M., 58 n
Latin America, 84
law, Arnold on, 319-20
Lawson, Thomas, 193, 237
lawyers: and status revolution, 151,
155-433; corporation, 158-63;
Brandeis on, 160-1, 163, 262
Lazarsfeld, Paul F., 216 n
League of Nations, 279
Lease, Mary E., 52 n, 71, 73 n, 91,
92, 129; quoted, 79, 83-4
Lee, Alfred McClung, 187 n
Lemlce, William, 20
Leuchtenberg, William, 272, 327

Lewis, John L., 320
Lexow Committee, 186
Liberal Imagination, The (Trilling),
12

liberalism: and conservatism, 12-4;
appraisal of, 15-6, 18; and Popu-
lism, 60-1; and business consoli-
dation, 252, 313-4, and war,
270-1; and political machines
and bosses, 308. See also Progres-
sivism and New Deal
Liberal Repubhcan movement
(1872), 139
Liberty Party, 98
Lilienthal, David, 313, 314 n,

322-3 n

Lincoln, Abraham, 72, 75, 79
Lindbergh, Charles A., 20
Lindsay, Vachel, quoted, 60
Lindsey, Ben B., 211 n
Link, Arthur S., 226 n, 250 n, 251 n,
260 n, 272

Lippmann, Walter, 316; quoted,
171, 263^ n, 298 n
Lipset, Seymour M., 120 n, 138 n,
153 n, 327

Literary Digest , 151
literature and extreme nationalism,
21; and agrarian myth, 25-7; and
Populism, 60, 67-70, 75-9, 82-7,
186, and business, 141-2, 200-12;
and Progressivism, 166, 196-8,
and realism, 196-8, 200, 208-10
Lloyd, Caro, 108 n
Lloyd, Henry Demarest, 104-5, 186;

quoted, 107-8, 141
Lloyd George, David, 278
lobbyists, 127 n, 216. See also pres-
sure group
Locke, John, 27

Lodge, Henry Cabot, 88, 91, 181 n;

quoted, 233
Logan, George, 26
London, 82

London, Jack, 21, 197, 238 n
London Economic Conference, 325
Long, Huey, 20

Looking Backward (Bellamy), 67
Los Angeles, 116, 146, 239 n
Louisiana Territory, 29

INDEX

xi

Low, Seth, quoted, 174-5
Lowell, A. Lawrence, 264 n
Lowenthal, Leo, 72 n, 73 n, 216 n
Lubell, Samuel, 298-9; quoted,

301 n

Luthm, Reinhard, 19, 283 n
Lydenberg, John, 186 n

McAdoo, William Gibbs, 297
MacArthur, Douglas, 86
MacBrayne, Lewis E., 209 n
McCarran, Pat, 81 n
McClure, S. S., 186, 191, 193;

quoted, 201-2, 211
McClures: as leading muckraking
magazine, 191, 201, 301; authors
of, 193, 195, 208-9; and business,
221, T. Roosevelt on, 237; and
first World War, 275-6 n
McConnell, Grant, 115 n, 112 n,

124 n, 125 n
McCulloch, Hugh, 79
Macdonald, Austin F., 263 n
McGrath, Earl, 151 n
machine, political, see political ma-
chine

MacKay, Kenneth C., 282 n
McKean, Dayton D., 265 n
McKinley, William, 90, 109, 135,
164 169

McKitnck, Eric, 213 n, 328
McVey, Frank L., 74 n
McWilliams, Carey, 80 n
Madison, James, 64
Madison, Wis., 155
magazines: muckraking, 186, 190-6,
201-2, 208-9, mass, 268
Mahan, Alfred T., 91
Malm, James C., 42 n, 46 n, 51 n,
55 n, 111 n
Mann, Arthur, 178 n
Mark, Irving, 53 n
markets, urban, 100, 173; interna-
tional, see foreign trade
Marshall, Alfred, 85 n
Marshall, Thomas R., quoted, 246
Marxism, 238, 324
Mason, Alpheus T , 172 n
Masons, 72, 98, 258
Massachusetts, 229

materialism, 210-2
Maxwell, Robert S., quoted, 268 n
May, Henry F., 149 n, 150 n, 152 n,
328

Means, G., 218 n
meat exporters, 38
Meat Inspection Act, 118
Meckkn, John M., 292 n
Mencken, H. L., 285
Merwrn, C. L., 137 n
Metzger, Walter P., 153 n, 327
Mexico, 270, 272
Michigan, 39

Middle Atlantic states, 38, 98
middle class, and reform, 5, attitude
toward Populism and Progressiv-
ism, 99, 105, 131, 135, between
industry and labor, 170, sense of
responsibility, 210, 215-6; ideals
of, 216-8, 222-4, investments of,
218-20; attitude toward business,
221, attitude toward government,
231-2, nationalism of, 272-3. See
also Mugwumps
middlemen, 112, 171
Middle West, 20, 131, 173, 176
migratory farm workers, 121, 123,
128, 324

militarism, 271, 273
Millard, Bailey, 193
Miller, Raymond C , 57, 105 n
Miller, William, 140 n, 219 n, 328
millionaires, 136, 146-8
Mills, C Wright, 140, 216 n, 327
Milwaukee, 173
mmimum-wage legislation, 240
Minneapolis, 173, 197, 201, 207
Minnesota, 68, 100, 101, 101 n, 103
Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party, 115
mobility: among farmers, 42-4;
among industrialists, 136, 146-8;
in middle class, 215-6. See also
competition

Moffett, Cleveland, 290
money, see fiscal policy
monopoly, see business, big and
pressure group
Montana, 104
Moody, John, 168

INDEX

Xll

Morgan, J. Pierpont, 150 n, 230,
234-5, 251, quoted, 235
Monson, Eltmg, 145 n
Morrill Land Grant College Act, 114,
117 n

mortgage indebtedness, 50, 55-7, 99
Mott, Frank Luther, 189 n
Mountain states, 99
movies, 128

Mowry, George, 144 n, 145, 167,
239 n, 246 n, 268 n, quoted, 144
Muckrakers, 185-212, 240-2, 284-5,
316

Mugwumps: and Populism, 91-3,
and status revolution, 135, 137,
139-40, and Progressivism, 135,
139, 262, attitude toward busi-
ness, 139-45; Lord Bryce on, 140,
and politics, 140, 185 n, 259, 262;
ideals of, 141-2, 167, 209, 211,
attitude toward immigrants, 177
Mumford, Lewis, 174 n
municipalities, see city and govern-
ment, municipal
Munro, William B., 266 n
Munsey, Frank, 144, 191
Munseys , 191
Mussolini, Benito, 325
Myers, Gustavus, 193, 196, 238 n
myth, definition of, 24 n. See also
agrarian myth and symbols

Nast, Thomas, 186
Nation , 142

National Association of Manufac-
turers, 226 n, 306 n
National Bank Act of 1863, 76 n
National Civic Federation, 258
National Civil Service Reform
League, 257

National Implement and Vehicle As-
sociation, 125

nationalism, 20-1, 61, 270-2, 301,
324

National Recovery Administration
(NRA), 304 n, 310 n, 311, 325
nativism, 5, 20, 61, 72, 82, 177, 180.

See also xenophobia
naturalization, 179
Nebraska, 50, 55-6, 101

Negroes, 61, 83, 101, 286
Neu, Irene D , 140 n
Neuberger, Richard L., 117 n
Neumann, Franz, 254
neutrality, 274-6
Nevms, Allan, 65 n, 89 n
“New Conservatism,” 14. See also
conservatism

New Deal and early reform move-
ments, 3-4, 300-2, 305-14,

growth of, 11; and liberal tradi-
tion, 18, agricultural measures of,
112, 119; opposition to, 227, and
business consohdation, 253-4,
268, 310-4, and Progressivism,
300-2, 308-26, 321-3, legislation
of, 300, 305-8, 311; and planning,
305; conception of government
in, 306-9, fiscal policy, 307-8; and
democracy, 308. See also Roose-
velt, Franklin D.

New Democracy , The (Weyl), 146
New England, 34, 98, 139-40, 230
New Freedom, 118. See also Wil-
son, Woodrow
New Jersey, 265 n, 308
New Nationalism, 301. See also na-
tionalism

newspapers, growth of circulation,
187-8. See also journalism
New York City, 82, 139, 146, 176,
177 n, 268 n

New York Evening Post , 142
New York Times , 186, 189 n, 284 n
New York Tribune , 136, 284 n
New York World Almanac , 136 n
Nichols, Jeanette P., 86 n
Nixon, Herman C., 99 n, 100 n,

103 n, 107 n
Nock, Albert J., 37
Non-Partisan League, 115, 116 n
Norbeck, Peter, 283 n
Norris, George W., 272, 283, 283 n,
quoted, 261 n
North, Douglass, 219 n
North American Civic League for
Immigrants, 179 n
North Dakota, 50, 104
Northeast, 145 n

INDEX

xiii

Northern Securities Company, 233,
235, 244
Northwest, 145 n
Nourse, Edwin G , 39 n, 110 n
Nye, Gerald P., 20
Nye Committee, 72

Octopus , The (Norns), 200
Odegard, Peter, 289 n
Office of Markets, 112
Office of Price Administration
(OPA), 119
Ohio, 39, 116

Old Order Changeth, The (White),
quoted, 255-8
Old World, see Europe
Old World in the New , The (Ross),
178-9

Olney, Richard, 89
Orientals, 83
Orwell, George, 68
Osgood, Robert Endicott, 272 n,

274 n, 275 n

Our Country ( Strong ) , 82

pacifism, 85-6, 271-2
Paine, Thomas, 26
Panama Canal, 273
parity, agricultural, 119
Parkhurst, Charles Henry, 186
Pamngton, V L., 199
“Passing of the Legal Profession,
The” (Bristol), 160
paternalism, 228, 241-2
patriotic orders, 138 n
patriotism, 272
Patton, Clifford W., 164 n
Paxson, Frederick L., 73 n
Payne- Aldrich tariff, 172
Pearlin, Leonard J., 153 n
Pearsons , 194
Peek, George, 304 n
Peel, Roy V., 183, 282 n, 298 n
Peffer, William A., 52 n, 62 n;

quoted, 65-6
Pennsylvania, 192

pensions, old age: governmental,
240, 266, business, 241, social se-
curity, 306

Peoples' Party, see Populist Party

Perkins, George W., 144
Persons, Stow, 217 n
Philadelphia, 176, 177 n
Philippines, 85, 271
Phillips, David Graham, 193-4, 197,
237

Phillips, John S , 196 n
Physiocrats, 25
Pmgree, Hazen, 145
Pittsburgh, 176
planters, 37, 38
Platt, Orville, 243
Platt, Robert Reat, 160 n
Plunkett, George Washington,
quoted, 183
Poles, 176

political boss, see boss, political
political machines, and Progressiv-
lsm, 5, 134, 254-69, 308; and im-
migrants, 10, 176, and city gov-
ernment, 174-5; Steffens on, 206,
growth of, 213; and national poli-
tics, 296-9; Arnold on, 321
political reform, see democracy,
Populism, Progressivism, New
Deal

pohticians, Arnold on, 321
population: breakdown of homo-
geneity, 8-9, growth of, 173 n,
215-6. See also immigration
Populism: appraisal of, 3-5, 11-22,
58, 80, 95-6, 99-100, and agrar-
ianism, 7-8, 62-4; and immi-
grants, 8-9, 177-8; and the

Homestead Act, 29; reactionary
tendencies of, 20-2; and farmers,
47-8, and frontier, 49-50, m West,
49-50, 56, 98, 100 n, 286, in
South, 49-50, 61, 96, 98, 107,
286, centers of, 50; and growth of
big business, 64-93, 246, and la-
bor, 64, 121-2, and money, 66;
platform of 1892, 66-7, 121; in
literature, 68-70, 75-9, 82-7;

anti-imperialism and anti-milita-
rism of, 85-6, and war, 86-91;
jingoism of, 87-93; and England,
88, and Cuban question, 89-91,
271, and Mugwumps, 91-3; mod-
em interpretations of, 94-6; early

xiv

INDEX

Populism ( continued )

history of, 96-8; in East, 99,
maximum strength of, 100; and
major parties, 101; leadership of,
101-9; lack of funds, 102-3; and
silver, 104-8, subsequent accept-
ance of program, 108; as school
for farm leaders, 115-6 n, and
Progressivism, 131-4, and con-
servatism, 132; ideals and objects
of criticism, 208-12, and isola-
tionism, 271, decline of, 326. See
also agriculture and farmers
Populist Party, 4, 63, 74. See also
Populism

Populist Revolt, The (Hicks), 49
Populists, see Populism
Portland, Ore, 146
postal savings bank, 108
Pound, Ezra, 8
Pound, Roscoe, 154
Prairie Farmer , 33; quoted, 39
Presidents, in business and labor
disputes, 233, conservatism of,
250, Republican, 283-4
press, see journalism
pressure group: farmers as, 7-8,
115-30, 283, labor as, 11, 134,
business as, 226 n, 228-36; m po-
litical campaigns, 265-6, Progres-
sive criticism of, 258-9; Progres-
sives as, 273-4
prices, 168-70

primaries, see direct primaries
Pringle, Henry F., 127 n, 172 n
Problem of Civilization Solved , The
(Lease), 83

professionals, alienation of, 148-68
profit-sharing plans, 241
Progressive National Convention
(1912), 244 n

Progressive Party, 5, 144. See also
Progressivism

Progressives, see Progressivism
Progressivism: appraisal of, 3-5,
11-22, 132-5, 164-72, 302-4;
and big business, 5, 134, 163-72,
212-54, and immigrants, 8-9,
177-80, reactionary tendencies of,
20-22; and farmers, 115; and

Progressivism ( continued )

Populism, 131-4; m East, 133,
163; and Mugwumps, 143; and
the status revolution, 143-66, in
South, 145 n, 286, in West, 145 n,
286, professionals and intellec-
tuals of, 148-68; and consumers,
172, journalism of, 185-6, 190-6,
and realism, 196-212, moral as-
pect of, 210-2, opposition to or-
ganization as destroyer of tradi-
tional values, 213-25, supporters
of, 216-8, 239, opposition to cor-
porations as threat to democracy,
225-36, economic program of,
236, and competition, 236, 242,
246, 303; and conservatism, 250-
1, and politics, 254-69, and in-
dividualism, 258-9; and war,
270-80; and tariff, 273; decline
of, 280-300, urban-rural conflict
in, 286-7, and Prohibition, 287-
91; and Republican Party, 295-6,
297-300, and New Deal, 300-2,
308-26, and the judiciary, 309;
Arnold on, 318-22. See also de-
mocracy, Populism, New Deal
Prohibition, 17, 286-91, 294, 296-7
proletananism, lack of, 10
prosperity: of farmers, 95, rise of
Progressivism during, 164
Protestant tradition: as a persistent
strain of Progressivism, 8-10, 144,
318, and immigrants, 8-9, 175-6;
Mugwumps and, 139; social con-
sciousness m, 150, 152, and the
city, 175-6; individual responsi-
bility in, 203-4, 208, ideal of re-
warded virtuous individualism,
221, 259, 305, and Prohibition,
287; and Klan, 291
pubhc opmion, 227
public ownership, 97, 105, 281, 304
public utilities, consolidation of,
169

Pujo Committee, 220, 230
Pulitzer, Joseph, 191
Pullman strike, 150, 165, 231 n, 233,
242

Pure Food and Drug Act, 118, 172

INDEX

xv

Pure Food Association, 257-8
Pusey, Merlo, 158 n, 219 n, 310 n

Quincy, Josiah, 139 n

"Radical Movement under Conserv-
ative Direction, The” (T. Roose-
velt), 262
radio, 268

railroads: and farmers, 35, 43, 58,
first transcontinental, 51; and
land speculation, 54-7, legisla-
tion, 108, 118; strike (1877), 150,
165, 231 n, 233, 242
Rainsford, W. S., 150 n
Raper, Arthur F., 43 n
Ratner, Sidney, 136 n
reaction, postwar, 280
realism: contributions of Progressiv-
ism to, 196-212; limitations of,
199-200, materials of, 200-3
recall, 255, 259, 266 n
Red scare, 280
Reed, Thomas H., 266
referendum, 108, 255, 259, 265-6,
266 n

reformers, civic, and immigrants,
183-4. See also muckrakers
reform movements, see democracy,
Populism, Progressivism, New
Deal

Regier, C. C., 194 n
Rendezvous with Destiny ( Gold-
man), 15

reporters, rise of, 189-90
Report on Manufactures ( Hamil-
ton), 27

Republican Party: and silver, 88,
104, early nature of, 97; and
Progressivism, 133, 295-6, 297-
300; agricultural legislation of,
117 n, 118; and immigrants,
178 n; Stimson on, 262; national-
ism of, 272; decline of m cities,
298-9

Republican Party (Jeffersonian),
270

Resettlement Administration, 124

responsibility, individual sense of,
203-12, 259. See also Protestant
tradition

Revolt of the Rednecks (Kirwan),
19

revolutions of 1848, 277 n
nee, 37

Ridder, Herman, 275 n
Riesman, David, 40, 162 n, 327
right, extreme, 232
Rdey, James Whitcomb, 30 n
Riordan, William L., 183
Ritner, Joseph, 30-1
nvers, 38

Robbins, Roy M., 55 n
Rockefeller, John D., 320
Rockford, 111., 82

Roosevelt, Franklin D., 3; on farm-
ers as pressure group, 120, and
reformers and bosses, 184; desig-
nation of second World War,
277 n, and election of 1940,
282 n; and election of 1936,
296 n; early political career of,
299-300, 301 n, 304-5; condi-
tions on accession, 302, on action,
305, 314-5; and political ma-
chines, 308, and Supreme Court,
309-10, nature of, 322 n, 323,
"quarantine” speech of, 325;
quoted, 120, 301, 305, 309 n,
314-5. See also New Deal
Roosevelt, George, 250
Roosevelt, Nicholas, 251 n
Roosevelt, Theodore, 5, 6, 275 n,
100; conservatism of, 13, 237-8,
250-1, 262; and imperialism, 91-
2; farm legislation under, 118;
Progressive program of, 132-3;
and election of 1912, 133; na-
tionalism of, 139 n, 272; and
Progressivism, 167; and business,
169, 235-6, 243-6, 248, 311; on
family, 171; on responsibility,
205; and morality, 212; and pub-
lic attitudes toward government,
233-6; on government, business,
labor, 233 n; on his leadership,
234, 250-1; on muckraking and
nch, 237; on industrial society,

xvi

INDEX

Roosevelt, Theodore ( continued )
244-5; urban popularity of, 246 n;
and first World War, 274 n, con-
ditions on accession, 302-3,
quoted, 92, 171, 233 n, 234, 235-
6, 237, 244-5, 250-1. See also
Progressivism
Root, Elihu, quoted, 162
Rose, Arnold, 81 n
Rosenberg, Hans, 51 n
Ross, Earle D., 114 n
Ross, Edward A , 154-5, 171, 203 n;

quoted, 178-9, 182 n
Rothschild, Baron James, 77 n, 78-9
Ruggles, Clyde O., 100 n
rural electrification, 128
rural free delivery, 128
Rural Post Roads Act, 118
Russell, Charles Edward, 196, 275 n
Russia, 85
Russians, 176

Sacco-Vanzetti case, 286
St. Louis, 176, 207-8
St. Paul, 173
saloon, 288-9

Saloutos, Theodore, 58, 112 n, 113 n,
116 n, 122 n, 125-7 n; quoted,
115 n

Saltonstall, Leverett, 139 n
San Francisco, 211, 239
Santo Domingo, 84
Saskatchewan, 53
Saturday Evening Post , 191, 193
Saveth, Edward, 177 n
savings, 218-9
Scandinavia, 51, 242
Scandinavians, 176
Schafer, Joseph, 121 n
Schattschneider, E. E , 261 n
Schlesinger, Arthur M., 82, 97 n,
173 n

Schwartz, Harry, 122 n
Scopes trial, 286
Scribners , 190
Scripps, E. W,, 191
Seager, Henry R., 169 n
Seasons (Thomson), 25
secession, 227

second World War, see World War,
second

Securities and Exchange Commis-
sion, 249 n

Seligman, E. R. A., 154
Senate- Populist strength in, 99;
representation m, 116-7, million-
aires in, 136, and muckrakers,
193-4, conservatism of members
of, 250, agrarian discontent in,
282

Senators, popular election of, 108,
255

service industries, growth of, 218
Seven Financial Conspiracies which
Have Enslaved the American
People (Emery), 75-6
Seyd, Ernest, 76

Shame of the Cities , The (Steffens),
200, 206

Shannon, David A., 217 n
Shannon, Fred A., 43 n, 54 n, 58 n,
111 n

Sharp, Paul F., 53 n
Shearman, Thomas G., 136
Shelton, George W., 160 n
Shenton, James, 328
Sherman, John, 77
Sherman Anti-Trust Act, 113, 164,
231, 243, 249, 312
Sherman Silver Purchase Act, 65,
88, 104

short ballot, 255, 263-4, 266 n
Shylock. as Banker , Bondholder ,
Corruptionist , Conspirator
(Clark), 75

silver question- and Populism, 50,
104-8; “crime of 1873," 76, Sec-
ond National Silver Convention
(1892), 78-9; displacement of by
Cuban question, 89-91; and ad-
mission of new states, 104
Simons, Algie, 238 n
Simpson, Sockless Jerry, quoted, 64-
5

Sinclair, Upton, 193, 196, 237,
238 n

single tax, 266
Slavery, 29, 37, 98
Slovaks, 176

INDEX

xvii

slums, 174, 176, 236
Smith, Alfred E., 184, 282 n, 283,
296-9

Smith, Henry Nash, 29 n, 328;
quoted, 29

Smith, J. Allen, 154, 155, 199 n;

quoted, 15
Smith, Jim, 182 n
Smith-Hughes Act, 118
Smith-Lever Act, 118, 125
social democracy, 10, 104, 281, 306
Socialist Party, 98, 179 n
Socialists, 238, 238-9 n
social psychology, 199
“social question,” 236, 240
social sciences, 153-5, 198-200
social security, 306. See also pen-
sions, old age

Social Thought in America (White),
6

Solomon, Barbara Miller, 177 n
South, 20, 230, and Homestead Act,
29; farming m, 36-8; position of
farmers in, 47; Populism in, 49-
50, 61, 96, 98, 107, 286; and
Negro question, 101; and absen-
tee ownership, 138, Progressivism
in, 145 n, 286
South Dakota, 50, 104, 116
Spam, 91

Spanish American War, 91, 164,
189, 210, 271
Spargo, John, 238 n
speculators, land, 41-3, 54-7
Spoil of Office , A (Garland), 186
Spreckels, Budolph, 144
Square Deal, 118. See also Roose-
velt, Theodore
Stalin, Joseph, 72
Stampp, Kenneth M., 327
Standard Oil Company, 169, 191-2,
201, 231 n, 249 n
Stanton, Frank, 216 n
status revolution, 135-66
Stead, W. T., 186
Stearns, Harold E., 198 n
Steffens, Lincoln, 186, 193, 195 n,
201, 289, 319, quoted, 176 n,
206-7

Steinbeck, John, 324

Stenerson, Douglas C., 28
Stem, Fntz, 327
Stevens, Thaddeus, 77 n, 81
Stevenson, Adlai, 13
Stewart, William M., 89
Stimson, Henry L., 163 n; quoted^
162-3, 262-3
stockholders, 218, 228
Storey, Moorfield, 139 n
Story of Life Insurance , The (Hen-
drick), 219

Straus, Frederick, 52 n
Strauss, Harold, 328
strike: anthracite, 233; Pullman,
150, 165, 231 n, 233, 242, Home-
stead, 165, 242

Strong, Josiah, 82; quoted, 175,
^ 200-1

“Subjective Necessity for Social
Settlements, The” (Addams), 208
subsidies, agricultural, 120
Suez Canal, 51

Sumner, William Graham, 140;

quoted, 258
Sunday laws, 183

Supreme Court: and anti-trust legis-
lation, 235, 244-5, 249; conserva-
tism of, 250; and F. D. Roosevelt,
309-10; and New Deal, 311
Sward, Keith, 81 n
Swedes 44

symbols, 75-8, 257-8, 286-90. See
also myth

Symbols of Government , The (Ar-
nold), 317, 319, 320-1
Syrett, Harold, 328

Taft, Robert, 86

Taft, William Howard: and elec-
tion of 1912, 133; and tariff, 172;
anti-trust actions under, 244 n,
246; and Nicaragua, 272; and
arbitration treaties, 273
Tale of Two Nations , A (Harvey),
77

Tammany Hall, 183, 296, 299
Tarbell, Ida, 186, 191-3, 195 n, 201,
211 n; quoted, 192
tariff, 136 n, 142, 171-2, 192, 252,
273, 283, 325

xviii

INDEX

Taubeneck, Herman E., 103 n, 105;

quoted, 106
taxes, 108, 118, 283
Taylor, Carl C., 43, 123 n
Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 241
Teapot Dome, 71, 283, 286
television, 268
Teller, Henry Moore, 106
Temporary National Economic
Committee (TNEC), 311,

313 n

Texas, 72, 116
Thomson, James, 25
Tilden, Freeman, 128 n
Till, Irene, 249 n
Tillman, Ben, 20
tobacco, 37

Tocqueville, Alexis de, 136 n, 156,
161 n, 227; quoted 42 n
Toiman, William Howe, 164 n
“Tortured Millions, The” (Wilkin-
son), 209-10

trade unions, see labor unions
Treason of the Senate , The (Phil-
lips), 193

Trilling, Lionel, 200 n, quoted, 12
True, A. C., 112 n
Truman, David B., 328
Truman, Harry, 301 n, 323-4
trusts, see business, big
Tryon, Rolla M , 39 n
Tugwell, Rexford Guy, 305
Turner, Frederick Jackson, quoted,
48-9, 50 n

Turner, George Kibbe, 289

Twain, Mark, 197

two nations, theory of, 64^93

underground government, 174
Underwood tariff, 252
unemployment relief, 306, 316
United States Bank, 227
United States Steel Corporation,

169, 230

university, emergence of, 153-5
University College, London, 327

Vanderhp, Frank, 251
Van Devanter, Willis, 310
Van Hise, Charles H., 246, 253

Van Zandt, Roland, 28 n
Vardaman, James K., 20
Vagts, Alfred, 89 n, 90 n
Veblen, Thorstem, 43 n, 154, 198
Venezuela affair, 89
Virgil, 25
Virginia, 98

Volstead Act, 290. See also Prohibi-
tion

voters, 228, 260. See also ballot
wages, 169

Walker, John Brisben, 191
Wallace, Henry C., quoted, 126-7
Wallace’s Farmer, 125, 126
Walling, William English, 238 n,
246 n, 316

Wall Street, 74, 75, 90, 235, 324.

See also investment houses
Walsh, Thomas, 283 n
war: and liberal tradition, 270-1;
revulsion against, 280. See also
anti-imperialism, pacifism, World
War

Warburg, Felix M., 251
Ward, Lester, 154
Warehouse Act, 118
warehousing, government, 97
War Industries Board, 304 n
Warne, Frank Julian, 176 n
Washington, 104
Washington, George, quoted, 41
Watkins, G. P., 137 n
Watson, Thomas E., 20, 63 n, 81,
92; quoted, 62 n, 82-3, 90-1
Wayland, J. A., 239 n
wealth: early distribution of, 136-6;
new class of nch, 136-8, 140-1,
145-8, and universities, 154-5;
T. Roosevelt on, 236-7. See also
businessmen

Wealth against Commonwealth
(Lloyd), 186, 200

Weaver, James B., 66 n, 98, 100,
102; quoted, 63, 65
Webb-Kenyon law (1913), 287
Webster, Darnel, 140
Welch, Rodney, 43 n
welfare programs, 240-1
Weimar Republic, 254

INDEX

xix

West: and agrarian movement, 32;
commercial farming m, 39, Popu-
lism in, 49-50, 56, 98, 100 n,
286, as part of world market, 51,
speculation in, 54-7; and absen-
tee ownership, 138 n, Progressiv-
ism m, 145 n, 286. See also fron-
tier

Weyl, Walter, 146 n, 154, 316;

quoted 146, 147-8, 170 n, 284
‘What's the Matter with Kansas?”
(White), 132

‘What the Farmer Really Looks
Like ” 128

wheat, 50, 52 n, 100, 100 n; and
third party action, 100 n
Wheeler, Burton K., 20, 309 n
Whigs, 29

White, Andrew D , 175
White, Morton G , 199 n
White, William Allen, on land spec-
ulation, 57, on Populism, 131-2;
on Progressivism, 132, 166, and
immigrants, 179 n, on magazine
publishing, 196 n, on moral as-
pect of reform, 206, 209 n, 210-1,
212; on popular government, 255-
8; and political reform, 259, 267;
quoted, 57, 131-2, 166, 196, 206,
209 n, 210-1, 212, 255-8
white-collar class, 216, 258
Whitlock, Brand, 289 n
Wiest, Edward, 112 n, 116 n, 118 n
Wilcox, Benton H., 100 n
Wilkinson, Florence, quoted, 209-
10

Willard, Frances E., 67
Wilson, M. L., quoted, 114
Wilson, Woodrow, 3, and agricul-
ture, 53 n, 118; and election of
1912, 133; and scholars, 155; and
lawyers, 161 n; as symbol of Pro-
gressivism, 167, on cost of living,
170, and political bosses, 182 n;
as academic reformer, 205; on
corporate officers and stockhold-
ers, 220, on industrial society,
222-4; and big business, 225-6,
228-9, 247, 249, 311, 313-4; on
investment bankers, 228; on mo-

Wilson, Woodrow ( continued )
nopoly, 231, 246; and socialism,
238 n; on competition, 247-8;
and conservatism, 251; on white-
collar class, 258; on popular gov-
ernment, 260; on ballot, 263;
pacifism of, 271-2; and Panama
Canal, 273; and entrance in war,
273, 275-7; and neutrality, 274-
6, on “citizens of the world,”
277 n; and the peace conference,
278-9; and Debs, 280, and elec-
tion of 1916, 295, and immigrants,
297; and economic conditions,
302; and New Deal, 313-4,
quoted, 170, 220, 223-4, 228-9,
231, 246-8, 258, 260, 263, 274,
277, 277 n. See also Progressivism
Wmg, DeWitt C , 127 n
Wisan, J. E , 90

Wisconsm, 98-100, 155, 267, 282
Wisconsin, University of, 155, 178
With the Procession (Fuller), 166
Wolcott, Leon O., 112 n, 118 n
Wolman, Leo, 169 n
women: rights of, 183, labor of,
240; and suffrage, 263
Woodbum, James A., 78
Woodward, C. Vann, 47 n, 49 n,
81 n, 91 n, 92 n, 107 n, 328
working class, see labor
“Working of American Democracy,
The” (Eliot), 229
workmen's compensation, 240
World War, first: and Progressiv-
ism, 3-4, 11, 175, 272-9; cultiva-
tion of land during, 53 n; delusive
beliefs about, 72

second: and Progressivism, 3;

delusive beliefs about, 72; F. D.
Roosevelt's name for, 279 n
Wyoming, 104

xenophobia, 73 n, 82-3, 85. See also
Anglophobia, anti-Cathohcism,
anti-Semitism, city, conspiratorial
manias, immigrants, isolationism,
nativism
Xenophon, 25

XX

INDEX

Yankee tradition: as a persistent
strain of Progressivism, 8-10, 318,
and immigrants, 8-9, 175-80,

xenophobia m, 83, 85, 292; Mug-
wumps and, 139, and the city,
175-6, and politics, 179-80,
184 n; on law and men, 201-3;
ideal of political participation,
259; ideal of individual responsi-

Yankee tradition ( continued )
bility, 277; and Prohibition, 287
yellow journalism, 83, 178-9, 188
yeoman farmer, myth of, 23-59. See
also farmers
Young, Arthur, 41
‘young America” movement, 270

Zelomek, A. W., 53 n